[prog] Mailing list software - how does the emailing work? (mass bcc?)

[Gareth Anderson]

Hi,

As you may now know I'm taked with custom developing mailing list
software from scratch with no knowledge of how to do this and very
little guideance (an invididual project which ~12 people are doing).

Anyway, just in regard to mass-emailing a mailing list.

Sending to each email address in a big loop would appear to be very
in-efficient.

My idea is that you would make a "to" address (thats the mailing
list's address), have a reply address of possibly nothing or a
moderator email address (moderator may be a bad idea though), and you
BCC a certain number of people.

I think there are limits from when you have too higher number that you
would be considered to be spamming people. So should I BCC 30 people
at a time?
Make it configurable?

Is this how things are done?

Note: obviously I now very little about mailing lists besides using
them (and configuring a single majordomo list :)). Feel free to point
out how it should be done (I've seen gnu mailman around but did not
see documentation on how it works internally).

Thanks,
Gareth