Create mailing list for newsletter

[uzee]

Hi,
Can someone please help me to create a mailing list. I'm trying to help a friend on his website. He wants to add a form where people can enter their email address and click "submit" to subscribe. He wants to collect those email addresses and then automatically email his newsletter to all those who have subscribed, say every two weeks. Now ofcourse there is a manual way to do it by collecting all email addresses and then manually creating an address list and emailing all of them but I'm sure there is a much smarter way of doing it.
I'm comfortable in html coding and know a bit of java script but I dont want to just use someones code as I want to learn as well.
If someone could please tell me how its coded/scripted or how many different methods are there to accomplish this, I will truly appreciate it.
Many thanks
uzee

[bjk2007]

You have to use a server side language like php, asp, jsp, etc. in order to do any back end processing of data. You can then store the e-mails in either a flat text file or a database. Writing a script for something like this is actually very simple to do.

The complicated part is getting the data in a format that the email program sending out the messages will understand. Normally newsletter scripts are full featured web applications for sending out e-mail messages from a web environment. If the person wants to send messages from another application, you'd have to figure out how to add the contacts to a list that their email client supports.

An example is a situation I'm in right now with a site I'm working on. A person wants a newsletter application to be merged with their contact manager, ACT (www.act.com). It uses a ms-sql database to store its contacts, so I have my web-based newsletter applications retrieve and insert the e-mail addresses to this database. Depending on what application your friend is using to send newsletters, doing this may be very difficult or simple, but I doubt it is impossible. You're going to have to do investigation of how the application stores its contacts.

There's going to be quite a bit to do here. First learn a server side language (my suggestion is PHP) and write a script to collect email addresses to say a file. Then figure out how the email application stores its contacts and figure out how you can add data to it. There's people here who can help you out with this if you need it.