[Trygve]

A client needs to send about 5000 emails to users of their product for an update notice. The local ISP limits them as far as outgoing email. A safe limit is about 30 emails/hour. The addresses are in a FileMaker database.

What is the best way to have some sort of cron job that only allows 25 or so to be sent at once and does this every hour. Granted it will still take days to do this, but I see no other way. The customers are receiveing updated license keys and rather than use postal mail, email is much cheaper.

Thanks,

Trygve

[utidjian]

Interesting problem. My first reaction would be to say, "Time to get a new ISP and/or talk to the ISP admins and work out a deal at least temporarily."

This is going to take on the order of 200 hours (about 8days and 8 hours) to send all the emails at the rate of 25/hr.

One way to do it would be to "send" all the emails using sendmail BUT put them all in a hold loop. Then use an hourly cronjob that will use 'postsuper' to pop 25 emails out of the hold loop. See 'man postsuper' for more info.

Another way would be to export the list of email addys from FileMaker to a flat text file, one address per line. Then have an hourly cronjob pop 25 addresses off of the list and send a standard format email to each one of the recipients in the sublist, then delete the addresses just popped from the main list... later-rinse-repeat.

Yet another way would be to just send all the emails and not worry about it. Let the ISP handle the queueing. Might be a good idea to talk to the ISP to find out how they handle such things. They may just hold 5000-30 emails in a queue and pop 30 emails out per hour... or they may just drop all but the first 30.

[Trygve]

How can I write a small AppleScript, turn it into an Application and set it up as a chron job?

I have the compiled script, but How do I set it to run every hour?


Thanks,

Trygve