The MySQL Database can be used to create a free online or offline mailing list. A basic mailing list database contains two tables. One table contains the name, email address, street address and ...

I would very much like to get this data into a MySQL database intact rather than replacing the characters with their non-accented equivalents.

Use the Excel file as an ODBC data source (connection string info here), and your MySQL database as the destination (using their ODBC connector). What OS is your process running on?