I need a guidance for automated task

[php4om]

Hello
I want to send e-mail greeting to users that have birthday today (they registered and entered their birtday). And I want that task to perform automaticaly everyday in some time. It is important to tell that my ISP administrator doesn't allow me any CRON (or similar) scheduler services, so I must somehow override that. I have one idea... Every day, first user who come to my website will be some sort of "victim" because he will be used to do automated tasks (sending mail everyday or deleting old adverts). User will not know that of course and after that I will set daily flag in my DB (in some table) that this task doesn't need to perform anymore this day.
It is not so elegant solution. Do you have some better idea? Is it possible to some automated task without my intervention and without any operating system task scheduler (CRON, etc...).

Thanks

[yelvington]

That's not a bad solution... if you have enough traffic to ensure that the process gets run in a timely fashion.

Another thing you could do is run a cron process on another computer and have it request the appropriate maintenance script via HTTP using lynx --dump or wget.

[php4om]

i did not understand
plz make it clear.
can i use cron form my own progrom not from directly.
thanks

[AstroTeg]

Yeah, I've done this too. If you have another computer that has Internet access, you could setup a job or task to run at a particular time. If you have Linux, its a bit easier to do - you setup a cron job to run wget or lynx to "visit" a special script of your. This special script does all the work in mailing people. On windows, you could setup a task in the scheduler. I think you can get lynx to run on Windows. Not sure about wget.