email reminders

rikmoncur

yup, I've searched the forums and google - got nowhere...

My isp sends me email reminders every year when stuff is ready to expire.
This, I presume, is an automated database system.

I'd like to do the same with php and mysql but I haven't a clue where to start.

Can someone point me in the right direction? What keywords do I need to search on, or tutorials to look for?

cafrow

I am not sure how automated you want this to be, but if you are looking to do it from a webserver you can use a Cron job to do a daily script execution that checks a database for stuff it needs to do based on a date field in the database.

annshallmark

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to do something very similar related to email reminders. Our website www.annshallmark.com sells birthday age figurines that start at age 1 and go up to age 21.

We want to setup a service that allows customers the opportunity to remind them to buy an item. Our platform is apache/mysql/php4 on Windows XP. I'm thinking that a customer would click the "Remind to buy this item" link, and that would write their email address and the date of the reminder to the database.

How would I go about retrieving that information from the database and actually emailing the customer? I don't have any outbound email servers setup, so I'd appreciate any advice on this as well.

Thanks,
Anit

liquorvicar

well, you'll need some sort of outgoing mail server to send mails.

as discussed earlier, put the reminders in a table and then run a script each day to check today's entries and email the reminders.

rikmoncur

Thanx for the replies!
I see someone is doing something similar on the coding forum here.

This system must exist somewhere - isn't there a tutorial?

acrabadabra

What you want, as opposed earlier, is to run a cronjob. So, what you do, is make a PHP script as you always do: that checks the date and send the mail. If the mail is send, don't forget to UPDATE the table that you did send the mail.

If you have created the script and it is working, then make sure your provider supports cronjobs and setup your crontab in e.g. cpanel. If your provider does NOT support cronjobs, then go here: http://www.bitfolge.de/pseudocron-en.html

There you will find everything you need to know!

Good luck.

rikmoncur

that's a great link, acrabadabra - I've always wanted to run a cron job but couldn't think of a use for one before.