Georges Crew E-Mail Scheduler

Help with Email Scheduling

This program is designed to assist with the scheduling of tasks and communication by accepting an e-mail message for later dispatch. It will also repeatedly dispatch an e-mail on an annual, Six-monthly, bi-monthly, monthly, fortnightly, weekly and daily basis. Facility is provided for viewing e-mails sorted by sender, recipient or date of dispatch. Having scheduled an e-mail, it is possible to later edit the contents, change the recipient, or delete the e-mail altogether.

Password access is required, but only a generic password facility is implemented. This means that the scheduler should be made available only to those with a strong incentive not to disrupt the e-mail messages of others or to engage in scurrelous activity.

Both sender and recipient must be full e-mail addresses. Multiple recipients are allowed, either listed on one line separated by commas, or listed one per line without commas.

Please feel free to e-mail problems or suggestions for improvement to the Webmaster

Installation Notes

mailview.cgi -- for perusing the mail queue

mailadd.cgi -- for adding new e-mail messages

mailedit.cgi and mailed.cgi -- for modifying queued messages

maildel.cgi and mailkill.cgi -- for deleting queued messages

mailhelp.cgi -- for producing this message

mailfile.cgi -- for scanning the messages and sending them at the appropriate time

library files cgi-lib.pl, date.pl, utils.pm and CGI2

The cgi script files need to reside in the cgi-bin directory on your server. The library files probably best reside in the Perl5 directory.

Mail messages each comprise a file with a unique filename constructed from the date and time that the message was queued. The directory in which these messages reside is specified at the top of the cgi scripts listed above ($path2). You will need to change the appropriate line in each file at the time of installation, and create an appropriate directory to hold the mail files.

The format of the mail files is simple, so that other software written by you can place mail messages in the directory for dispatch at the appropriate time. The format of the mail files can be obtained by running mailview.cgi and clicking on one of the listed messages created previously with mailadd.cgi.

The last thing to do to complete the installation is to create a CRONJOB to run the cgi script mailfile.cgi each day, usually in the early morning. The script mailfile.cgi scans the directory that contains the mail files and checks each one to see if it is time to send it. If the message is to be sent repeatedly, mailfile.cgi adjusts the dispatch date accordingly If it is to be sent once only, mailfile.cgi sends it then deletes it.

ENDE