(Email alerts come e.g. every 15 minutes, you want to process e.g. one per
day).
Some other solutions: you could write an entry to a logfile, then tell
swatch[1] to keep an eye on it. Swatch is my standard solution to "do
something as soon as an alarm hits, but no oftener than some time interval".
And another approach: fire up a script every time an alarm comes in. Have the
script log the time to a logfile of its own. Also have it log the time if it
processes an alarm. When it starts up, after it logs the time to the file, it
can check and see if an alarm has been processed before, too recently, and if
so simply exit.
-Bennett
[1] <URL:ftp://ftp.stanford.edu/general/security-tools/swatch/swatch.tar.gz>