Id like to generate an automatic email at certain times of the week from my website to certain users. i.e at 12.30 on wednesday id like an email reminder sent to user example@example.com. Can anyone point me in the right direction

you need to set up a cron job (or crontab), make sure your webserver allows you to run a cron job, if so look in your control panel for how to set it up, if it's not in there then log in via SSH and type "man cron" to get the man pages. Crons can be difficult to set up so try searching the web for some tutorials or asking in the linux forums for how to set up this particular cron job

Sorry i didnt mention that the website sits on a windows platform machine.

The windows scheduled tasks manager works the same as cron. You can set up the task to run your php script.

If you want a purely web based solution take a look at this article in my blog: http://fijiwebdesign.com/content/view/86/77/

You could use the method mentioned there, with a bit of php like:

pseudo code:

[PHP]$query = "select from my_tasks where time < time() and complete = false".
$uncomplete_tasks = query($query);

foreach ( $uncomplete_tasks as $task) {

// carry out task
// for example if you list php scripts to run.. do something like
exec("wget http://example.com/$task.php");
// then update the database, task success, or fail etc.

}[/PHP]

Many thanks for that