Some friends of mine's band are in need of a good mailing list solution, and I've offerered to provide!

They have 2-3000 email addresses (which continues to grow) and ideally would like to be able to subcatagorise them by location so they can send to specific locations (when they gig there) or hit the whole list at once (new releases etc.).

Mailman or similar linux app would be good, but on first impressions I don't think it's too hot for the splitting the list up into locations.

I know I could knock out a php/MySQL solution but I'm concered about performance issues, particularly as they get more emails.

Does anyone have similar experiences or recommendations?

well the most likely culprit would be majordomo

Do a google search in groups for 'membership list'.
Two or 3 years ago there was a thread on that subject with illustrations of bash scripts.

It may give you some insight into the matter.
Dave