asp.net membership, notify administrators when account about to expire - asp.net

Question

I have a requirement that a certain email distribution list should be notified every so often (still to be determined) about user accounts that are nearing expiration.
I'm wondering the best way to achieve this, I know its generally a bad idea to spawn another thread within asp.net to handle this type of thing, so I'm thinking maybe a simple service is the way to go but for something so small this seems like it might be slightly overkill.
Ideally I'd like something that doesnt require much babysitting (eg. checking service is running).
I have also suggested having a page in the site with this type of information but it is likely that it could be a few days before this is checked. We also cannot let users extend their own expiration date.
Are there any other viable options.

Answer 1

The best suitable method to work on it according to is
create a application which will select list of all users whose account expiry date is nearby (eg. 10 days from today) as per your requirement.
This application will be scheduled as an daily execution (you will create an exe with log file to display errors raised and total number of emails sent in one execution.)
This application will fetch all the records based on criteria and send the emails to all yours using the basic HTML template. and once the email is sent, you will update a column (notificationFlag) in your database as 1 if you have sent is once in last 10 days. else by default it will be 0
you can schedule the exe by the end of the day at 12:10 am (just incase your database server and webserver is not matching in time) every day. .

Answer 2

This is something I've done which is similar to Prescott's comment on your answer.
I have a website with an administrative page that reports on a bunch of expiration dates.
This page also accepts a QueryString parameter SEND_EMAILS, so anytime an administrative user of the site passes the QueryString parameter SEND_EMAILS=true a bunch of emails go out to all the users that are expiring.
Then I just added a windows scheduled task to run daily and load the page with the SEND_EMAILS=true parameter.
This was the simple code I used to issue the webrequest from the console in the scheduled task:
namespace CmdLoadWebsite
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
string url = "http://default/site/";
if (args.Length > 0)
{
url = args[0];
}
Console.WriteLine(GetWebResult(url));
}
public static string GetWebResult(string url)
{
byte[] buff = new byte[8192];
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest) WebRequest.Create(url);
HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse) request.GetResponse();
Stream webStream = response.GetResponseStream();
int count = 0;
string webString;
do
{
count = webStream.Read(buff, 0, buff.Length);
if (count != 0)
{
webString = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(buff, 0, count);
sb.Append(webString);
}
}
while (count > 0);
return(sb.ToString());
}
}
}