Is Drupal the right way?

I'm starting a new endeavor, I wonder if I'm choosing the right tool

[jjsai]

I have this new project with a potential customer, you know 80% has been discussed and in "black and white". The "customer" has this email-blast system to communicate inside their online community (NO SPAM, I SWEAR) and also the ability to search the text of all those emails. They are not happy with their current provider (web hosting, web designer and web manager) so they asked me and I'm selling them the package with the same they have and the redesign of their web. In all honesty I do not want to develop everything from scratch (besides I'm not totally sure I can do it all by my self) so I thought that one of those CMS will help a lot and apparently Drupal was suggested to be more flexible (harder to learn though). My main concern is that I may not be able to deliver the main two functionalities: email-blast and the search.

Could someone, somebody, anybody, perhaps everybody :) offer me opinion, tips hey I'm even accepting "how to"s (I'm not looking for somebody else to do my job). Shall I go in a different way and use something else besides Drupal?

Almost forgot: They are a small organization of professionals exchanging advice, customers, etc. They are not technical at all because their profession.

Thank you so much in advance

[ergophobe]

My impression is that you really should have a 3rd party handle sending email because you'll likely have higher deliverability. I don't do mass emailings, so I can't say for sure, so I'd be curious to hear from people about how they handle it.

Search. You can install a Google custom search on the site to integrate with any site, even static ones. So I wouldn't say you need drupal or anything particularly flexible for that either.

Just a couple of ideas to say that you might build it with something you already know well and use some add-ins or third-party services to handle the two items you mention.

That said, yes, drupal could handle this.