How possible is THIS?

cron emails from existing database

[mcjohnson]

Friends,

I am entertaining a prospective client who wants something like this:

I sign up for the site and indicate three hobbies: "Bungee Jumping", "Cat Juggling" and "Cow Tipping"

Once I register, I begin getting emails each week that give me the latest information on those three things.

This must be automatically generated. In other words, if this client has 1000 registered users, and each has a couple of different hobbies, manually sending this email would be, obviously, impossible.

So, the script needs to identify each users' hobbies and send out an automatically generated email customized for each person.

Presumably, the various pieces would be pulled from a MySql database, the email script would be set to cron these out weekly based on interest, and so on.

I know this is possible because we all sign up for these types of emails every time we register for LL Bean, or somthing like that. ("notify me when the followin items are on sale!")

But is this something that would need to be custom-written in PHP/MySQL or is there some sort of existing open source script that can be modified to do the job?

[jatar_k]

I would think that it would be something that needed to be custom written, though you may find it as a part of some ecommerce software.

[jeremyluby]

This is pretty simple to do. I made something exactly like this today. It took about 1 hour, with validation and processing for returned emails.