Hour 18. Managing a Simple Mailing List

This hour provides the first of several hands-on, small projects designed to pull together your PHP and MySQL knowledge. In this hour, you'll learn the methods for creating a managed distribution list, which can be used to send out newsletters or anything else that you want to send, to a list of email addresses in a database.

The mailing mechanism you'll use in this hour is not meant to be a replacement for mailing list software, which is specifically designed for bulk messages. The type of system you'll build in this lesson should be used for only small lists of fewer than a few hundred email addresses.

In this hour, you will learn how to

• Create a subscribe/unsubscribe form and script

• Create a front end for sending your message

• Create the script that sends your message