> You mean a single-user host? Mainly just reporting critical issues to the user. (Yes, I read the rest of your comment :)) This is exactly what syslogs are s

> You mean a single-user host? Mainly just reporting critical issues to the user. (Yes, I read the rest of your comment :)) This is exactly what syslogs are supposed to do. Logs are just so insanely much simpler to get right as implementation artifacts. The key is no not log to a dozen different files scattered across /var/log, but to do it in a centralized manner (syslog, journal, whatever you want to call it). It would be trivial (heck, someone's probably alread done it) to just listen for anything reported at "CRITICAL" level to the syslog and report that in a UI. Why on earth would you implement something as complicated as SMTP just to do that? If you're concerned about monitoring X number of machines, having them send e-mail is decidedly not the way to do it. You'd use something like syslog forwarding (see rfc5424) and central aggregation/metrics. EDIT: If there were a standard format for "syslog-over-email" then I could at least partially understand, but as it is you're going to get arbitrarily formatted messages from arbitrary programs. Not very useful.