please can anyone explain how u can legally create a mailing list. Thanks

legally create a mailing list? U may need to explain more. do u mean u need a software or web app to help you send bulk emails or how to put together one without breaking any rules. Whatever, here are some few rules
1. Be sure the receiver has truly subscribed to be included in you mailing program
2. Always attach an unsubscription link to the email so that the receiver can easily remove him/her self if he no longer wishes to receive any further mail from u.
3. Send at most one mail in a day
There are a whole lot of others but that will probably be when u explain in details what u really want.

thank you for your response. Actually am trying to do a bit of marketing online and am trying to create a mailing list to send out the materials

and one that doesnt get recognised as spam and thus, sent into the bul folder.
i am suffering from this also.
does anyone have a remedy for this?

Oh, now I get. Its easy. U can either pay an email marketing company to do it for u or do it yourself.
For the first option (getting a mail marketting to do it for u), check out mailchimp.com. There are actually a lot of them. Just google around fro email marketing companies or something similar.
For the latter, u just need to a script that loops through the emails (which uv got) and mail them one by one. As in something like below (in PHP)

<?php
$r = mysql_query('select email from list');
while(list($email) = mysql_fetch_array($r)){
     mail($parameters);
}
?>

The above snippet is just to give u an idea. In real world, using mail() in loops is not advisable as it opens and closes the mail socket in each call. So u may want to use a mail class instead. But then that is just as simplest as it can get. U may want to do other things like schedule when it should send, get reports (bounces, clicks, opens, delieveires, etc), create support for html and plain txt (for email clients that doesnt support html) and many more. And that is where the email marketing companies comes in.
If u really want to do things yourself, get in touch wt me. I will charge u though - and real big 

@bug24
There are a lot of reasons mails enter spam folders. If u set things well, it wont. To start with, how do u run ur own list?

Ok, lets know how much u'll feel like charging to get this done.

Drop me a mail via ray (at) ngbot (dot) com

I have a mailing list script that you can upload to your site. But you must have a hosting account of your own for it to work. It works with php and MySQL. Get in touch with me.