It can be a useful tool in a network. At the university library where I work they have it set up so that if any part of the system goes down, a message is sent to all of the IT folks, but the program is disabled to the rest of our computers or we'd continually get automated messages that are meaningless to us.

The downside is that the IT folks also get the tripe that is shipped over the service by folks who've figured out who to do it.

SRS