[freeside-users] Expiration alerter questions

[Gerald V. Livingston II]

I'm setting up and using the expiration alerter in Freeside 1.58. I fiddled
with the email template a bit to see what it would look like but it appears
that freeside-expiration-alerter sets a flag somewhere that prevents it
from repeatedly emailing a customer if run daily. I changed the expiration
date on my test account and got the email the first time I ran it but can't
get it to send me a new email even if I keep changing the expiration date
on the test customer to a good date then back to an about-to-expire date.

I would rather it not use any flags to determine if a customer has already
been emailed because I'd actually like to be able to use cron to run it on
the 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th of each month and have it send to every
about-to-expire and already-expired account every time I run it.

And, I'd like to have it either print out, or email to a dedicated address,
(or both) a copy of the alerts on the first run each month. We send paper
expiration alerts because many of our customers appear to never read their
email. Email alerts get about a 1% response while paper alerts get closer
to 90%.

I can fiddle with the template to get it into a form compatible with
folding and stuffing into a window envelope if I can get copies of it to
either spool for printing or email to a dedicated address. Uhhh --- and if
I can get it to send every time I run it so I can test.

I'm thinking that a separate copy of freeside-expiration-alerter with the
TO email address hard coded can be used for the emails to a dedicated
address for printouts if it can be made to actually send the "alert" every
time it is run rather than only once in a month. I can probably hard-code a
separate template for that copy to use if someone could point out how to
make it print rather than email.

I do not know perl but if you can at least point out the sections of the
code I should look at and give me hints as to what functions I should
investigate in the perl documentation I may be able to hack the changes
myself. I'm pretty good at self teaching the bits I need to learn if I have
a direction to go in.

Thanks,

Gerald Livingston 

Sysmatrix.Net Billing and Email Geek