Sending emails automatically

I've asked the care providers to give me mum's schedule, so that I can fill in details for the whiteboard. I need the schedule for the forthcoming week on Friday, otherwise Mum's week starts with a 'Sorry, no information about your next visit' message on Monday mornings.

The carers often need a nudge to send the schedule out on time, and I'm not good at remembering to nudge people. My memory is like a sieve, and I don't know how I managed before smartphones and web-based diaries.

Anyway, Perl and cron to the rescue. I run the remind_carers.pl script on my computer, first thing every Friday morning. It sends a reminder from a gmail account to the carers. The script stores the gmail password in plain text, so I took the following steps to minimise risk:

• Set up a special gmail account (<unmonitored_gmail_account>), that I don't use for anything else. (I couldn't get the 'reply to' field to work in this configuration, hence the inline message about not replying.)
• Made root the owner of the Perl script, and set permissions to 700.
• Created a root cron job.

That's pretty much it. It worked fine last Friday.