I’m not a programmer so forgive me if this a “duh” sorta question. I want to develop a web app which at a set date and time, can automatically send a mass email shot using either Amazon Simple Email Service or Postmark.
Of course you can do that with Yii (in fact - depending on your needs - Yii could be total overkill too ;-)).
There are two ways:
You can create a simple console app, so no user interface, where yo have to type in your date and the app does everything quietly in the backround
You could create a fancy pants webapp with UI and lots of buttons too.
The only part I can’t speak for is the Amazon Simple Email Service as I don’t know the API but I am 99% sure that it is a trivial task to talk to this service via Yii (i bet they use a REST service or something like that).
Yii won’t provide you a solution for your problem. Most probably you need to setup a Cronjob to execute the desired action at a specific time.
You still can build that application (console- or webbased) with Yii - But it does not natively provide functions for setup cronjobs or execute actions at a specific time because this is something that needs to be done at system level (PHP is not designed for that).
You should be able to create cronjobs via UI from within the app with a bit of hacking (see http://www.yiiframework.com/extension/webshell). You could call a shell script that receives the date and creates a cron which would trigger a Yii action sending data to Amazon’s Service. With ipFilters it should be quite secure too. As I said, total overkill if you don’t need some sort of web presentation (UI or something)