Everyone starts out small. And when you only have 10 or 50 subscribers you might think that spending money on a management system would be a waste of money. You're absolutely right! That is, if you're not accepting any more subscribers... I know that some people start out by getting people to subscribe by sending an email to them. When they receive an email requesting a subscription list-owner saves that email to its own folder in his/her inbox and adds new subscriber's name and email address to his/her list.
When it comes time to send out an issue of newsletter/ezine, list-owner sends a copy to everyone on list by simply adding each subscriber to list of addresses in "To:" field. Others have progressed one step further and actually take time to send message to each subscriber separately.
At least that's one step in right direction... You MUST send each email to your subscribers as a solo-mailing. If you simply add a large amount of addresses to "To:" field in your email program, then email each subscriber receives will contain email address of everyone on your list. That's a disaster! And there's also fact that people hate mass mailings. An email like that would not be perceived as a personal letter at all.
Personalization is key! You must make every subscriber feel like letters they receive from you are to them, personally. You should include name of your subscribers in subject line (greatly increases chance of your subscribers actually opening your email), and if you can, include it in message itself as well. Or even better, include some other personalized information about your subscriber.
Now, it IS possible to do email marketing correctly by doing it manual way, like I've described here. There is one major problem though... Take a moment to think about how much time it would take you to paste your text into a new message, personalize subject line and message itself, send it to that one subscriber and then repeat same process for each subscriber you wish to send letter to.
It would probably take as much as 15-20 minutes to send your latest issue to 100 subscribers. That's not counting time it would take for you to manually make absolutely certain you've removed all people from your list who have requested it, and time it would take to manually add any new subscribers to your list.