I really appreaciate your responses but bare with me plz.This is the full scale of what I'm trying to do. Firstly I want to run an event scheduler in mysql so that on 9:00AM the active flag field for the 1st 200 emails would be set to 1, then at 10:30AM have another event to set them back to 0, and at that very exact time have another event for the whole new 200 batches set to 1. then so on and so fourth till like 5.00PM I figured out the sql query to do this. Now that in mind I understand that I could simply create a cron job by going into c-panel and accesing the cron icon. It gives me the option to set a crontab which is by picking the times and dates, and also you would see the command box which as you mentiond would require for me to enter something like this "php -f /home/public_html/cron.php" so that it would run my php script that I created. Ok now ofcourse I havent created such a script. Could you give me some sort of a script example where it would grab the emails from my database within a certain table which hold all the emails and ultimately who are only set to 1 in active_flag field. Just to mention I would set the event scheduler and the cron tab to similar times so that it will flow nicely.