Auto-sending Email

[ScubaDvr2]

Ok let me explain this with a story.

Let's say [insert imaginary user here] wrote an e-mail on my website on 11/7/02. He wants it to go out on 11/12 (5 days later). He wants this e-mail to automatically be sent on 11/12, without him having to do anything. How would I write a script that would send it for him on 11/12, without him actually visting the site on 11/12 to activate it?

If anyone could help me here i'd be very greatful. This is one of the only things I cannot do in PHP.

Thanks

[Jayson]

Have your script store the email in a database instead of sending it. Then have another script scheduled on a cron job looking in the database every so often for emails to send at the right time.

[ScubaDvr2]

Thanks, do you have any suggestions or webpages that would tell me exactly how to do that though?

[Kilo]

Erm, set up a database table which stores "to", "subject", "email body", "date required" and a "sent" flag. Insert the emails into this.

Then write a script which checks that table for all mails where "sent" = 0 and "date required" < Now(). It should send all the mails the query returns, and set the "sent" flag to 1 each time for each mail sent successfully.

Schedule a cron job to run that script daily, preferrably at a time of day when the server load tends to be at its lowest.

[ScubaDvr2]

Thanks guys, for the help. I know though to put the stuff in the database to later use. That is a no brainer. I was wondering how exactly to start a cron job in the unix shell