There are many, many uses for mailing lists, from informing users of news about your site to alerting interested people about an update to a project you are working on. Coupled with some management tools, disseminating information through a mailing list can be a snap, and new users can add themselves and be welcomed to the to the list without your involvement.
There are programs available for download and for purchase which promise to do the dirty work for you, but with a little effort, PHP offers all the tools you need to create a full-featured management application which you can access from anywhere on the net. Best of all, doing it yourself will give you the skills you need to customize the application to precisely fit your needs, which is a true mark of a scripting professional.
This tutorial will guide you through building a complete mail list administration solution, capable of handling multiple lists. Suitable for small-medium sized lists (less than 500 names), flat files are used to store information for later retrieval. Many file access commands will be used and explained, and we’ll cover how to send mail from a PHP script.
/ 52 
