delay the sending of email in php

[Dude22]

Hi everyone,

 

I am working on a site, that will allow dentist, doctors and the like to set up automated E-Mail reminders for their clients, instead of having to call them. 

 

I am relatively comfortable in php.  But I have never done anything with E-Mail before...  My main question has to do with sending E-Mail on a specific date.  I have seen a few ways to do it, but nothing that really seems desirable.  One way, seemed to require that someone be using the site, to send the E-mail.  Ie: if an E- mail is supposed to be sent at 6, but no one logs on until 7:30.  Then that E-mail won't be sent until 7:30.   The other method that I have seen used cron, this second method, seems superior but much more complicated.  What method should I use???

 

Any, hits/tips to get me on the right direction would be appreciated!

 

Thanks,

Josh

Edited April 8, 2013 by Dude22

[requinix]

Cron. It's not that complicated really: you add an entry to cron telling it to run a script (from the command line) every once in a while, like every five minutes, and that script does whatever it wants to do. Like process all notifications it should send out at that time.

[Dude22]

Ok, I have never used cron before, and am not really sure how it works,  How do you interface between php, or mysql and cron???

[requinix]

Cron runs commands at certain times. It's very flexible in how it does so but that's it in a nutshell.

 

Then you just make a PHP script. You can't use web-specific stuff like the REMOTE_ADDR, and the DOCUMENT_ROOT might not be what you expect, but it's all just PHP.