[freeside-users] Expiration alerter questions

[Gerald V. Livingston II]

On Mon, 04 Dec 2006 15:09:59 -0500 Richard Siddall
<richard.siddall at elirion.net> wrote:

> Gerald V. Livingston II wrote:
> > 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 don't see it setting any flags.  Looks to me like it will send out an 
> e-mail 30, 15, and 5 days before expiration of a customer's credit card. 
>   It has a 24 hour window, so it'll send out an e-mail every time you 
> run it within a 24 hour period, i.e. it's designed to be run once daily, 
> every day.

So far I fixed the "sending to a set address as well as customer" by adding
a "Bcc:" to the email creation section.

A reply from Jeff (the author) pointed me to the 30/15/5. I'll probably
just add two more sections for now to get it emailed approximately
once/week and look at hard coding the dates later or possibly removing them
entirely so it ALWAYS sends when run then use cron to adjust the dates. For
now I'm just tweaking the "30 day" run as I advance in the month.

I'm fiddling with the template now trying to get the extra variables for
the address etc like an invoice so I can create a printable version for
folding and mailing. When I get that looking right I'll see about creating
a separate version that spools them to a file with a page break at the end
of each for printing once a month.

Luckily I only have 2 customers moved into the new system so far who have
cards expiring in December. I've emailed them and told them to ignore the
repeats. Hmmm -- I guess I could just break the "To:" header in the email
creation section for now as well.

Learning a new language "as you go" is always ... interesting.

Thanks,

Gerald