[Remind-Fans] regular notification of repeating reminders

[Hendrik Jaeger]

Hi,

I just started using remind and am still trying to get to grips with it.

For now I want remind to remind me of birthdays 20 days in advance,
every day until the birthday is reached. So far my REM looks like this:
REM 18 Sep +20 MSG Birthday: Some Body %a

One technology I consistently use since years and expect to be using a
few more decades is E-Mail, so I would like to have remind send me
emails. Since my server runs 24/7 in contrast to my laptop, I ran
remind on my server like this:
rem -z '-kecho %s | mail -s "REMINDERS" henk at example.org'

I started that command a few times (with slight variations, like "%s"
vs. just %s) on 31.08.2015 and the days following, but only received two
emails (both on 31.08.2015) about the reminder above.

0) How should I run remind to send emails? Is my command sensible?
Please suggest anything that you think would make more sense.

1) Why does remind not repeat the reminder up to the birthday? What am
I missing?
It seems my reminder above only triggered once (or rather twice for some
reason) when I started remind, while I’d like it to trigger every day
until the set date.

2) How does remind keep track of which reminders have already been
triggered?
Even when I stop and restart the command I use, I don’t receive another
reminder about that birthday reminder. So I’m guessing that remind has
some kind of state saved somewhere. Is that the case?

I’d like to understand what I’m doing and how remind exactly works.
I hope my questions are clear and I have not missed something obvious.
I am grateful for any advice or suggestions on how to integrate and use
remind properly. Please tell me if my questions are lacking information
and feel free to just point me to the f…ine manual if what I’m asking
is documented already. I did read it but it’s easy to miss things on
the first pass …

Thank you very much and best regards

henk

-- 
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?