setting up cronjobs in web host's cPanel

[ArkiStan]

Well, here's the behind story. We are a small office and while we have a web domain and associated email addresses, we fetch the mail with POP3 using gmail as our main client. Anybody who uses POP3 with gmail knows that the interval for fetching mail can be pretty slow unless you get sh*tloads of mail. Apparently gmail automatically determines the fetching interval based on how much mail you get to that address. Based on our current usage gmail fetches our email about once an hour, which is not nearly enough for business purposes. After some searching I found this article (http://techpatio.com/2010/guides-how-to/gmail-how-to-modify-pop3-mail-fetcher-frequency) which claims you can trick gmail into fetching POP3 emails more often simply by having more email sent to that address. You can do that by setting up a "cronjob" with your webhost to automatically send frequent emails to that address and then simply filtering them to be sent to trash in gmail.

Now, to get to my point, I've found out where I make cronjobs in my webhost's cPanel. Now I just need to set up a cronjob, but I don't know how to. The cronjob itself can be scripted to perform any task I want. Since this is only to get the email notification out, the command would purely be fore the sake of running the command. I'm wondering what would be a very simple and innocuous script or php script file I could run on my webhost. Any ideas? Of course once I decide on what to run I'll need help with the code as well.

Thanks in advance.

[ArkiStan]

Some examples of cronjobs people usually schedule seem to include:

- an automatic backup script, which backs up your MySQL database and emails a copy to you
- automatic execution of a script to import/update data such as RSS feeds, etc.

These are just examples I found. I don't do RSS or wordpress-type things so I'm not sure if the above tasks pertain to me. I just have a regular old flash website. I will be needing to run this script every 15 minutes so the task needs to be simple and light. Could there be a script that simulates a website hit or simply "runs" and erros out, or even better, does practically nothing?

[ArkiStan]

Okay. My original post was a bit complicated, but at the end of the day all I'm trying to achieve is to find some kind of automated mechanism to have recurring emails sent to me at 15-minute intervals for an indefinite amount of time. I've heard outlook has this function, but I prefer the mechanism to occur purely online. Any other tips are welcome!

Thanks.