Automated Blog Posting from Text Files?

I have approximately 874 articles that I need posted to my WordPress blog. They are already written up (PLR), all in individual text files.

I would like the following done overall:

1. Categorization and tagging
2. Date the posts to make it where 2-3 articles were posted each day prior, e.g. the first 2-3 articles were posted today, the next 2 articles were posted yesterday, the next 1 article was posted 2 days ago, etc and go all the way back, randomizing between 1-5 posts per day.

- or - would it be best to time the posts to be in the future so as to reduce search engine sandboxing risks?

If there are ways to automate this, that would be fantastic. Otherwise I was going to post a job on oDesk for this. Thanks in advance.

try TXTAsPost wordpress plugin

You can use Blogsense-wp for getting it done

here's an overview of it

use textpressor plugin. easy one

Thanks everyone for your tips! I will try them all and see how they go.

Zipposter. You can find it here.

Changing the dates wont help, google will still index them all quickly, you would be better to time the submissions.