[thelist] scripts performing email merge

[Izaak Branderhorst]

As others have pointed out, the bottleneck will be where the message is 
actually delivered appropriately via smtp... the database overhead is 
usually quite low in comparison.

As far as open-source newsletter-style mailers go, if you'd like to roll 
your own, PHPMailer looks like an excellent library to use. Otherwise, 
check out PHPList, which I've used before to send out approximately 
1200/hour but some people have better results. It's definitely not the 
fastest method out there but it's free and somewhat flexible.

Izaak