It's big claim to fame is that it automatically re-joins cross-posts. If a message is posted to more than one mailing list, mail2news will figure it out (based on the message id) and will use Supercedes and cross-posting to re-join the news articles so that you end up with just a single article.
The other thing it does right is tolerate failure on the part of the news server. It maintains its own spool of messages needing posting.
Current status: maintained, but I use gmane for most stuff
Last update: 2005
Download: here