We want to email a few hundred people every month. Until now, that's been done by adding the names to the email program's address book and sticking the lot of them in the BCC line (because unlike say the BBC, we hide everyone's address from everyone else).

This is obviously not the best way to do it, not least because we're being dragged kicking and screaming into having to use Outlook soon (mind you, it's been 'very soon' since last July!)

So, it was off to google and hotscripts to find a free mailing list manager, preferably in PHP, with a web interface.

I don't mind it needing MySQL, but I do mind having to recompile it to use a different file format. I also mind having to turn off the register_globals protection because it's an old script. The admin must be able to add people without getting them to confirm, but no-one else should be able to do so (ie double opt-in). Emails have to be able to be sent in plain text and we must have control over the header and footer (no ads we can't delete!)

Mailman is overkill until we decide we want a email list rather than a newsletter, which we probably never will. We're also not interested in archives, or readers being able to read via the web. If I want themes, I'll listen to a soundtrack.

Mailgust… what was wrong with that one? It was the first one I tried and I think it didn't let you import from a text file.

Subscribe2me wants money to import subscribers.

phpLedMailer wants MySQL with InnoDB.

MyMail's install.php is broken.

email_list_lite wants register_globals ON.

We found something, but it's not perfect – as well as no double opt-in, I have some security doubts to the extent that I've ripped what program it is out of the mail header.

Any other suggestions?