creating a mailing list

Hi I have a list of email addresses in mySQL from people who have signed up on my site and I want to use PHP to email out to the list. My initial thought was to go through the loop, sending an email to each person, but then I saw this somewhere: "It is worth noting that the mail() function is not suitable for larger volumes of email in a loop. This function opens and closes an SMTP socket for each email... not very efficient." Does anybody know the best way of doing a mass mail through php? Also, do you know how php mail() handles bounced emails? Ideally I'd like to either receive them or use a script to record then. Many thanks Chris