One of the blogs on my Movable Type installation is actually using the notifications feature built into Movable Type (which gives you the ability to let people subscribe to a blog via email) and needed to do a bulk import of email addresses that he already had in csv format. Unfortunately, Six Apart doesn’t provide a way to do a bulk import so I dug into google. Because the install is backed by MySQL, the solution was to use the LOAD DATA INFILE command, which reads a csv file from disk and loads the data into a table you specify. In case someone else ever needs to do this with Movable Type, the syntax I ended up using looked like this:

LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE 'contacts.csv' 
INTO TABLE mt_notification 
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' 
LINES TERMINATED BY '\n' 
(notification_email,notification_blog_id,notification_name)

and my contacts.csv file looked like this:

ajohnson@cephas.net,10,Aaron Johnson
...

Also interesting to note that according to the MySQL documentation, the LOAD DATA INFILE command is usually 20 times faster (!) than using separate INSERT INTO statements.