How to delay the dispatch of an e-mail? Click button to send NOW but wait until 6.00pm until the email gets actually sent.

Question

I have a php script that does some processing (creates remittance advice PDFs, self-billing invoices, Sage CSV file etc...) and at the end outputs a screen with a form, in which the names and e-mail addresses of the people paid appear. User makes a selection of names by clicking check boxes and then there is a Send button which sends out emails with remittance advices and self-billing invoices attached. This all works nicely, BUT they now decided that when they click the Send button, they would like the e-mails to be sent NOT straight-away, but at 6.00pm.

Is it possible to set the dispatch time of the message in the SMTP header? Can the MS Exchange server be configured so that e-mails from a particular sender will be held until a certain time before they get sent? IT Support dept. claim it used to be possible in the old days of dial-up connections when it was simply cheaper to send stuff at night... but that this functionality was removed. Is this true? I have no idea how hard is the task at hand. It seems very straightforward and I guess it really is a task for the IT support guys to handle. But maybe I am wrong?

If this can not be set up at the Exchange server side, how could I go about achieving the requested functionality? And, no, this is not an exact duplicate of this question. I had a look at that but it didn't seem to answer my questions. Any help greatly appreciated!

Edit

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Apache running on MS Windows Server 2003. Database is Oracle 10g. There will be no CRON set up. The email queue table would need to store all attachments too. I would like to avoid doing this at all cost. No way to specify dispatch time in header?

Answer 1

You could save those emails into a database. And then create a cronjob PHP file that executes every few minutes to check if there are emails to be sent in the "queue" database.

Here's a tutorial on something like this.

Answer 2

Windows (non-server editions, at least) has a "Scheduled Tasks" control panel item similar to CRON. Just from looking at it briefly, you can probably write a PHP script which sends your mail "now," but run it using the CLI at whatever time you want to send the mail using Scheduled Tasks.

Answer 3

Actually you can do this. If you are using an exchange 2003 server, you can set up a different SMTP connector. Under the delivery options there is a way to change it from send always any scheudle you pick.

Here is a nice tutorial for setting one up. link text

One thing you will need to do is when you create the new SMTP connector, set it up with a different port to listen on. That way you can send to that one instead of the standard connector.