Schedule recurring emails and reminders

Three ways to schedule an email

1Create a FormSMTP project

Sign up free and add a project. Pick your email provider so the SMTP host and port fill in, enter your login, and click Test connection. Gmail, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Zoho, Amazon SES, Brevo, SendGrid, Resend, Mailgun and any other SMTP server work. Personal Outlook.com and Hotmail addresses don’t, because Microsoft only allows OAuth sign-in for them.

2Design the email

Open Templates and build the email in the visual builder, or paste HTML. Use variables to personalise it: {{first_name|there}} fills in each contact’s first name, with “there” as the fallback. A contact’s name, email and custom fields are filled in automatically, and you can set extra variables, such as a link, that are the same for everyone.

3Choose who gets it

Scheduled emails go to contacts. In Emails, pick everyone who’s subscribed, one or more tags, or type in addresses (up to 500; they’re added as contacts). For a reminder to yourself, type your own address.

To build a list, add people in Contacts, import a CSV (an email, name and tags column are recognised; other columns become custom fields), or collect them with a signup form, as in the waitlist guide.

4Pick when it sends

Under When to send, choose:

• Send now: goes out right after you confirm.
• Schedule: one send at the date and time you pick.
• Repeat: daily, weekly or monthly from the first send, with an optional Stop after date.

Times are in your browser’s timezone, and repeats keep the same local time, so a 9:00 weekly email stays at 9:00 when the clocks change. A monthly email set for the 31st goes out on the last day of shorter months. You can stop a scheduled or repeating email at any time; it goes back to being a draft.

Unsubscribe links, handled

Each person gets their own copy, with a personal unsubscribe link. If your template doesn’t include {{unsubscribe_url}}, FormSMTP adds a small link at the bottom. Every email also carries List-Unsubscribe headers for one-click unsubscribe in mail apps. People who unsubscribe are skipped in every later send, and their page lets them subscribe again if it was a mistake.

Limits to know

• Scheduled emails count toward your plan’s monthly limit (50,000 a month on Pro). Once it’s reached, the rest of that run fails and shows in Logs.
• If the project has Allowed recipients set, contacts outside that list are skipped. Send list email from a separate project with Allowed recipients left empty, rather than clearing it on a project whose API key or AI connections send other mail: with the list empty, that key can email anyone.
• Your SMTP provider’s own daily limits still apply. For lists of more than a few hundred, use an account built for bulk email, such as Amazon SES, Brevo or Mailgun.

Or ask your AI assistant

Connect FormSMTP to Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor (see the MCP setup guide) and say what you want:

Send the “Weekly digest” template to everyone tagged team every Monday at 9am Asia/Kolkata until the end of March.

The assistant uses the schedule_email tool, which takes the same options as the dashboard: template, audience, first send time, timezone, repeat and an end date. It should confirm the audience and timing with you before scheduling, and cancel_scheduled_email stops it later.

Custom schedules: cron and the send API

FormSMTP’s HTTP API sends immediately; it doesn’t take a schedule. When you need a rhythm the dashboard doesn’t offer, such as weekdays only or the first Monday of the month, or an email built from your own data, run a cron job that calls POST /api/v1/send. Use the project’s API key (fs_…), keep it in an environment variable, and leave Allowed websites empty, since the request comes from a server.

# crontab -e
FORMSMTP_KEY=fs_your_api_key

# 08:30 on weekdays, in the server's timezone
30 8 * * 1-5 curl -s -X POST https://app.formsmtp.com/api/v1/send \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $FORMSMTP_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"to":"you@example.com","subject":"Daily standup in 30 minutes","text":"Notes doc: https://example.com/notes"}'

The same in Node.js 18 or later, with a saved template:

// remind.mjs: run with node remind.mjs
const res = await fetch("https://app.formsmtp.com/api/v1/send", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: {
    Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.FORMSMTP_KEY}`,
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    to: "team@example.com",
    template: "Weekly report",
    variables: { week: new Date().toISOString().slice(0, 10) },
  }),
});
const data = await res.json();
if (!data.success) throw new Error(data.error);

No server? Use GitHub Actions

A scheduled workflow runs for free on GitHub’s machines. Save your key as a repository secret named FORMSMTP_KEY and add:

# .github/workflows/reminder.yml
name: Weekly reminder
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 9 * * 1"
      timezone: "Europe/London"
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  send:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - run: |
          curl -s -X POST https://app.formsmtp.com/api/v1/send \
            -H "Authorization: Bearer ${{ secrets.FORMSMTP_KEY }}" \
            -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
            -d '{"to":"you@example.com","subject":"Weekly review","text":"Time for the weekly review."}'

GitHub runs schedules on the default branch, no more often than every 5 minutes, and runs can be delayed when Actions is busy. In public repositories, scheduled workflows are switched off after 60 days without activity. Without a timezone, the cron time is UTC.

Emails from the send API don’t get unsubscribe links added. For anything that goes to a list, use the Emails scheduler, which handles unsubscribes for you.

FAQ

More guides

• Can Claude send emails? Connect it to your SMTP
• MCP email server: send email from Cursor, ChatGPT & more
• How to send email from a static website (no backend)
• HTML contact form that emails you (copy-paste, no backend)