Mail-merge is a way of taking two documents and merging them into a third form. In this case, one document is the body of a letter. The other document is a list of, say, e-mail addresses.
The actual merge is when you send a copy of the letter to each e-mail address.
Word has a good tutorial on doing this, and there are lots of other tutorals on the web.
If you wanted some web-based application to do a mailmerge, what I would do is to have, say, a Perl script open an addresses file on the server. Then, it would sequence through the addresses and send a note (probably using sendmail) to each recipient on the list.
Populating the mailing list is a different process. That can be done any number of ways. You might upload the list every couple of days, or even have a "sign up for our mailing list!" link that takes the address they offer and automatically updates the list.
I've mail-merged locally using Word -- I do it all the time for one of my newsletters -- and I've worked with Perl messing with sendmail. I've not done exactly this sort of thing, but it certainly seems do-able. I would be surprised if someone authoritatively told me it couldn't be done, so I'm pretty confident it's do-able.
But it requires a good understanding of sendmail and of whatever language your server allows (be it Perl, C, Forth, etc.) and of how you implement CGI programming on your server.
Chances are, your ISP already has some tools you can modify.
Hope that helps!
Cheers,
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Edward
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