Thanks for all the replies! I readily admit that I am not familiar with email systems or distribution lists--nor even Perl...

Truth be told, I am not even a real programmer. In my job I mainly do technical writing (English graduate), but we're a small company so I also maintain our company's website, and from time-to-time this requires some CGI programming etc. All my Perl I picked up on my own and I know it's not elegent and there's probably a million better ways to do it. Most of the time I don't know what I'm doing, but I look at examples and eventually come up with a solution if I play around with it long enough. This was why I posted my questions, to become more familiar with it and see what others are doing.

Why didn't I just go with existing mailing services? Before I even thought of using them I had already spent a lot of time collecting customer data via a form, building and maintaining a subscriber list complete with unique subscriber codes, unsubscribe scripts, etc. All customer data is stored in our own MYSQL database, and I don't know of a way to expose our collected data a service such as Mailman.

And no, I'm not a spammer. . . (*insulted grunt*). If I was a spammer, I'm sure my script would already be much more efficient and cunning and I wouldn't be posting here. :-) This is simply an opt-in Newsletter.

Anyway, thanks everyone! You've given me some direction. I will ponder upon these mysteries and attempt to come up with a course of action.

Jared