I worked at a company where a majority of error notifications from our batch programs was handled by e-mail.  This turned out to be a pretty good system until the dreaded security patch for Outlook arrived on the scene.  It essentially neutured Outlook as you counld no longer send message from a script (VBA or even Visual Basic) without getting a pop-up box.  Brilliant solution and quite elegant as it fixed the problem immediately and finally (well kind of).  However, those of us who came to rely on Outlook to do certain things, like send our error messages and process communications pulled our hair out and nashed our teeth. 

Recently I have come upon a nice hack to get the functionality of Outlook back.

http://www.dimastr.com/redemption/

This hack will let you use a similar object model to the original one without the security restrictions plus there are some additional properties and methods that the original object model did not have.  Well worth looking at if you want to automate Outlook.