A step to remedying the issue of someone updating the table from outside your application is to add INSERT or UPDATE triggers on that table. The stored procedure can send a pipe message or email to wake up your monitoring thread to amend it's plan. I've used similar techniques for situations in which multiple events need to be accommodated; in your case it's: 1) New email added to the queue with a send time earlier than the earliest current one 2) Message from SQL Server to alert of a change in the queue table (via SMTP or named pipe) 3) Trigger time to send the first email(s) out It sounds complicated, but the implementation isn't actually all that difficult. And it's a handy tool to have in your arsenal for future situations.