I'm no expert on the use of fork, so I'm just going to suggest a different approach: rather than spawn off a further subprocess from the web server, why not have the CGI write to a file (say, the list of addresses and the message) and have a cron script (say, that runs every five minutes) check for the existence of that file and do the work then?

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor