time-delayed emails to a mailing list

[Peter]

I dealt with this via shell script. You may also want to look at gcal(1) 
which allows you to set up a whole calendar of dates and tcal(1) which 
allows you to run things sheduled in the future (such as sending a 
warning x days before something is going to be celebrated).

The output of gcal need not go to a terminal, it can be piped into a 
script that emails the relevant file or whatever, plus running gcal from 
cron will automatically email you the output, plus gcal has an exec 
option (see below).

Just put gcal in a cron job and make up your own calendar of important 
events. (hint: gcal in cron will send you email and your email 
account/procmail can act as list distributor - or subscribe the address 
whence gcal/crontab runs to the relevant mailing list - i.e. create the 
ml user and run gcal from his crontab - depending on what you want to 
generate you may want to mark up the mail using m4 or such, not that 
gcal is missing on options). I have a similar setup to remind me of 
birthdays and so on. I get mail once a day about important dates etc. 
plus the normal holidays. The interesting option set for gcal is 'gcal 
-m -f myevents.gcal' and for you likely --execute-command. The file has 
a very simple syntax. E.g.:

YYYYMMDD text                       special (see manual)
00000101 Someone born on 1970.01.01%i19700101 
...

gcal doc is in 'info gcal' (the manpage is a joke). Making a template to 
edit the myevents.gcal in tcl/tk should be easy.

You are going to like the info ;-) (there is a reason for my posting the 
relevant part here). (hint: gcal cannot be used to boil coffee. But it 
already knows how to do almost everything else, I think).

hope this helps,
Peter

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