Here's a helpful tip for anyone that needs to send automated emails for some reason. I've been using this method for a few years to automate emails I send out regularly for project work, e.g. status reports. Maybe this is useful to someone else as well?

This assumes you have some form of Unix, cron support and mailx installed. I think Mac OS X will give you all of these out of the box. I have the developer tools installed, so I'm not sure what the default configuration is any more.

Say for instance you regularly update your team by email with project status reports. You could create a cron job that says, "Mail me a project status report template every Friday that I can fill out, then send the reply to my team." No fancy software needed. You can do it all in email via a cron command. From your Unix prompt,

1) Input crontab -e and press enter

2) You're now in a text editor. Most likely it's vi. Enter the following:

0 0 * * 5 mailx -s "This is the subject" -r replyaddress@somedomain.com recipientaddress@somedomain.com < /path/to/somefile

3) Now you need to save. If your server's editor is vi, you'll need to type ":wq" to write and quit. Now you're done.

I'll deconstruct the crontab commands if you're unfamiliar:

0 0 * * 5 mailx = Tell mailx to send the message every Friday. Literally, this is saying, at :00 seconds on the 0 hour (midnight) on every month of the year on the 5th day (Friday). If you want to know more about the date/time intervals, check out this documentation

-s "This is the subject" = This is the option to include a subject in your email.

-r replyaddress@somedomain.com = This is the option to include a reply-to email address. When you hit reply in your email reader, to TO: address will now be whatever you've put here, e.g. the Team's email alias.

recipientaddress@somedomain.com = This is you obviously, but if you want this reminder to go out to everyone, this can be the team email alias.

< /path/to/somefile = This is the path to the message you want to send in the email. In my example, this would be the project status report template.

That's it. Easy, no? Email, in my opinion, isn't going away. I would guess that even though spam might make email a productivity drain, for most business users it's their number one productivity tool. I get the efficiency of using CMS rather than email. I don't need to be sold on that. But I need to use email with most of the groups I work with because there's no resistance to using email in those communities. With these groups, I'm not up to the task of introducing them to a new system.

But one strategy that could serve as a gateway to using CMS might be to couple scheduled email to the CMS. Perhaps you could CC the messages to a rich blogging system like Traction Software that accepts incoming email and the messages will be automatically posted to a web site. Traction would be cool because you can then email reply via Traction on the status report and the reply gets submitted back to the team via email and once again captured in the site. Anyway, this is just food for thought. I started out this post just wanting to capture my email scheduling process, but my posts on doing project work often seem to come back to how to integrate those processes with blogging.