One of the things we'd like to do with our installation of Links SQL is send a daily email to our Users table. This email is one of the reasons why our clients register in the first place, and the idea of using the mail feature of Links SQL instead of a daily export/import of the Users table to a mail engine has some smiles on the faces of some staffers.

Unfortunately, while creating the mail list isn't bad, we don't see a practical way to schedule mailings. All mailings seem to be for immediate delivery. We'd like to be able to "queue up" mailings up to a week in advance, for a specific time of day.

Any ideas?

Alan Frayer
Don't just read the news - make the news!
Your World News - http://yourworldnews.frayernet.com

I'm surprised, given the length of time the issue was posted here, that no one has volunteered a solution, even if only to suggest another product...

It's really quite impractical to manually launch a daily e-mail, and even more so to extract the membership list and import it to an external mailing program, when the list changes daily.

Isn't there someone who can give me some practical advice?

Alan Frayer
Don't just read the news - make the news!
Your World News - http://yourworldnews.frayernet.com

An untested suggestion:

See if the mailings could be setup to be triggered thru cron using
path/to/nph-email.cgi emailsto=1

Where 1 will be different for each of the mailings. So if it starts from 1 first week could have seven cron entries setup with emailsto=1 ..... emailsto=7

If this works, then every week when the mailings are setup, the cron entries would need to be changed to, the numbers after emailsto= ...

It's just a thought ... never really tested ... so you could give it a try... and do post your findings if possible...

HyTC

Hi.

OK Correction to above and Tested Version:

Say you setup 7 Newsletters Monday, Tuesday .... etc saved as templates by that name (one each day) on single say.
Click On Send for each but do not click on Start Mailing link.
Setup each Start Mailing Newsletter Thru cron with following command:

/path/to/links/admin/nph-email.cgi mailing_id

The value of mailing_id would be visible when you place cursor over the Start Mailing Link.

Substitute the mailing_id with the id of the Newsletter for that day. So if Monday starts with mailing_id=21 then your cron entry would be

/path/to/links/admin/nph-email.cgi 21
/path/to/links/admin/nph-email.cgi 22
....
...
so on.

On Sunday, when the Sunday's Newsletter is emailed automatically, you set down tp editing each of the Templates with a fresh content and just click on Send Button again for each of them (and no further)

Edit the mailing_id for each of the cron entries.

Repeat the same for every week on a given day .... In extreme case you could do for the entire Year

Done



HyTC

While not something I would entrust to a clerical normally, this looks like something that can do the job with a set of step-by-step instructions and a bit of finger-crossing.

Thank you SO much for providing a workable solution to one of the most annoying aspects of this project!

Alan Frayer
Don't just read the news - make the news!
Your World News - http://yourworldnews.frayernet.com