But if you call it a robot, non-technical people will confuse it with
other things (like web-crawlers) which do belong to the general class of
robots.  I still say "mailing list manager" is the best generic term
short of "list server" (lower-cased, two words) and I think you are
making a bit of a mountain here :)  The terminology already exists,
what you need to do is educate new users to understand it, not create
new terms for their convenience and hope that eventually they will
learn the congruency between the terms they learned and the "classic"
terms.  If there is a better way to Balkanize the computing community
than the latter, I don't know what it would be :)

Nathan