I have been asked to add a facility to a site where people entering their names and addresses into a web form will automatically be sent an enquiry form by snail mail.

The form data is already being collected into a csv logfile on the server. Until this latest request I had a macro which downloaded the csv via ftp, converted it into an excel spreadsheet, and emailed it to the guys in England (I am in the USA, the server is in Canada, and the guys who want to mail the letters are in England - they will all be mailed to addresses in the UK).

I'm having a really hard time getting my head round how this can be done at all, let alone how I put it together for them when I'm in the USA and they are in the UK.

Hmm. If they have a laser printer and a spare Linux box in the UK, you can load envelopes in the envelope tray and regular paper in the other. The form would point to the spare Linux box and store the contact address for each person in a database. Every night at midnight GMT, print out first the envelopes, then the forms themselves. All that would be necessary to do in the morning would be to put stamps on the envelopes, stuff them and mail the letters out.

Would that work all right for your situation?

Thanks for your reply... so how would my RaQ3 go about telling their local computer to jump into action.... I presume their machine would need to be online 24/7 in order to receive instructions?

I would insert records into a MySQL database on your RaQ3...then their local computer could run a cron job every night that downloaded information from your database. That way it wouldn't need to be on 24/7.

Great, thank you. This gives me a good starting point. :)