Reminder via email

There are utilities that will remind you of events, but they usually require a program running at your computer hogging resources. Since I have a web host I thought it would be nice to have a way of setting events and receive notifications and reminders via email. I am sure such service is provided by hotmail or yahoo but I am sure as hell, these services are provided with more annoyance than usefullness.

For a while, I was using iping.com but then they decided to charge for their service.

These are what i look for:

• Simplicity, ad free, easy to use.
• Must be able to handle repeating events at set intervals (e.g. birthday reminder every year)
• Ability to send advance reminder (eg. remind me 2 days in advance) is nice even though not crucial.

I have used with success Kristina Pfaff-Harris's "RemindMe (3.0.8)" script for a long time now. It is I believe still the only non MySQL perl driven script around. It does all the above but has the habit of sending email reminding you of every little modification you do to your event. I haven't been able to suppress that. It requires cron to triggle the script at least once a day to be useful. this is very likely the simplest solution.

Lately I have been looking at PHP/MySQL alternatives.

1. Email reminder 0.6 (about 60k) <http://www.cogit8.org/emrem/>
   Main complaints: the default installation insist on its own database eventhough it uses only one tables. Table prefix requires editing manually. confined and mediocre function...
   
2. E*Reminder 0.91 (about 70k) <http://sourceforge.net/projects/e-reminders/>
   Uses 2 tables, assume its own database unless manually installed and edited. Table prefixes can't be that hard to implement! This script is better than "Email Reminder". It has rather poor usage-flow issues but because of the individual php files called, could be modified easily. It features a timezone compensation feature, so users can set their time zone and have the reminder sent to them at the correct time.
   

Here is a list of free email reminder services. I have not used any fearing possible spam!