Scheduling Repeat Mailings Across Different Time Zones

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maydaymike
Posts: 7
Joined: Fri Jan 21, 2011 12:24 pm

Scheduling Repeat Mailings Across Different Time Zones

Post by maydaymike »

We have a situation where we need to send out daily bulletins to a master list of subscribers that will be constantly changing. This information is 'date-sensitive', and two different mailings will ned to be despatched to each subscriber on each week day (ie not weekends).

The challenge is:

a) The subscriber list is distributed globally - across 14 different time zones from GMT+13 to GMT-8;
b) Each time zone must receive the same daily bulletins at the same fixed 'local' times - eg 06:00 for bulletin 1 and 12:00 for bulletin 2;
c) The bulletins are only despatched on weekdays - ie Monday > Friday.
d) The server will most likely be located in UK time zone.

So far:

1) As the layout and template of each mailing will be identical 'Content Manager' will allow us to standardise the format, and then insert text/images by referencing 'today's date' against approriate file names - and hopefully use a maths function to offset the day in despatches to the GMT-13 zones - which will need to effectively be despatched a 'day early' compared to 'server date';

2) This means that we would have either 28 individual lists OR 14 target groups within a master list;

So far so good - but we are now stuck at how best to schedule a repeat action!

We COULD set up an individual lists with a specified delivery date/time for each and every mailout - but this would mean setting 140 mailings up per week which is likely to be both tedious and error-prone - if carried out as a manual task. We looked at whether it would be possible to use a date-based mailing set - but again it seems as though this would just occur immediately after midnight 'server time' with no abilty to specify a definite despatch time.

Alternatively we could use an 'external' scheduling system - such as Windows 'Scheduled Tasks' - to call a form/script etc which would trigger the mailing. This would be easier to create the repeat 'triggers' for each mailing, and also keep on top of 'summer time/daylight saving' time shifts as they occured.

But then our next problem is a suitable form/script that would either:

1) Trigger a mailing to an entire mailing list; or better
2) Trigger a mailing to individual target groups (ie timezones) within a master list.

From our tests so far it seems that the scripts demonstrated in the resources wil only send a single mail to a single specified customer ID in response to a form - whereas what we really want is to send a mailing to either an entire list or a specified target group.

Does anyone have any ideas as to whether this script is feasible? -

Or is there another (better) way of achieving our goal? We have looked at the 'Webservices' options but again we may be up against the same problem unless we repeatedly create new lists.

Any feedback much appreciated!