I'm looking to write the emails sort of like what Apple sends everyone in their newsletter. How would I go about doing that? is it a special program or something?
Apple codes their own emails with HTML, probably with in-house software. You can add HTML in your own email as well, templates are probably available online. You may be interested in Leopard's Mail: http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/features/mail.html
Compose your message as a web page using any HTML editor. View the page in Safari. Then use Safari's File menu item "Mail contents of this page" to open a new message. Fill in addresses and subject and click send.
If your page contains images, you'll have to "publish" everything first to a real web site so the links in your message will work.
For best results you should use an online service like Constant Contact or Mail Chimp. Be sure to provide a link to your email on the web in case folks have their html off in their email clients.
What's problematic about html emails is if you don't host the images right then the email won't look right.