A nice thing about using sendmail is that it will retry on internet failure for a predetermined time like 24 hrs or so (whatevers in the config). So you should still get alerts regardless even if they are delayed a bit.
Am thinking about where to go with this in the future - stuff like simple Harmony hub activity "switches" or other things.. that's why I named it "DoNetStuff". 
Could also build a controller app following @cobra's lead.. depends upon how much time I really want to spend on all this.