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ASP email alerts
Posted 24 Jun 2008 04:09:47
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24 Jun 2008 04:09:47 Susan Jones posted:
the previous person working here designed a database/asp that external people access to gain information on our site and message board, through it they also maintain their informtion and insurance. What I need to do is set up email alert to the external customers to alert them that their insurance is due for renewal a month before then a fortnight before it is due.
I am not sure where to begin, or even where to put the information.
Replies
Replied 24 Jun 2008 11:31:49
24 Jun 2008 11:31:49 Alan C replied:
Hi Susan,
I don't do asp - get that out of the way first <img src=../images/dmxzone/forum/icon_smile.gif border=0 align=middle>
however, I think your message is looking for an overview of how to go about it rather than specifics.
Sounds like you need a cron job, that's a timed activated script on your server, that gets kicked into action say every day, what it does is goes to your database and performs a query that finds all the external customers who are due for renewal in 14 days time. You might run that once a day. You might consider having another field in the customer record to record the fact that a follow-up email was sent, so they don't get duplicates. Handling dates is 'fun' if you have not done it before then checkout unix timestamps so you can easily do arithmetic on dates that are stored as seconds since 1 Jan 1970, sounds weird but it makes life very easy.
You might put those records into a separate table, or array, then process then one by one sending the emails. Here you might consider putting something like the last part of the customer postcode in the email as a way of authenticating the email.
Once they have gone you will find that lots of them will bounce back, because people have changed email address etc, so you will want some way of picking those up and maybe going back to the database and doing an update to mark the email addresses as suspect, then depending on your company policy you might follow them up by phone. That could be another cron job that ran daily and might also generate lists of customers say 7 days before renewal so you could follow up all the email bounces and the others that had not renewed.
This is sounding like a really exciting project already <img src=../images/dmxzone/forum/icon_smile.gif border=0 align=middle>
Hope you get some other feedback on this too.
I don't do asp - get that out of the way first <img src=../images/dmxzone/forum/icon_smile.gif border=0 align=middle>
however, I think your message is looking for an overview of how to go about it rather than specifics.
Sounds like you need a cron job, that's a timed activated script on your server, that gets kicked into action say every day, what it does is goes to your database and performs a query that finds all the external customers who are due for renewal in 14 days time. You might run that once a day. You might consider having another field in the customer record to record the fact that a follow-up email was sent, so they don't get duplicates. Handling dates is 'fun' if you have not done it before then checkout unix timestamps so you can easily do arithmetic on dates that are stored as seconds since 1 Jan 1970, sounds weird but it makes life very easy.
You might put those records into a separate table, or array, then process then one by one sending the emails. Here you might consider putting something like the last part of the customer postcode in the email as a way of authenticating the email.
Once they have gone you will find that lots of them will bounce back, because people have changed email address etc, so you will want some way of picking those up and maybe going back to the database and doing an update to mark the email addresses as suspect, then depending on your company policy you might follow them up by phone. That could be another cron job that ran daily and might also generate lists of customers say 7 days before renewal so you could follow up all the email bounces and the others that had not renewed.
This is sounding like a really exciting project already <img src=../images/dmxzone/forum/icon_smile.gif border=0 align=middle>
Hope you get some other feedback on this too.