Making a box "scream bloody murder" if certain jobs aren't running -- any ideas?

This morning, we learned that SMTP and MSF, which we only use for programmatically generated emails, had been down for several days without being noticed, until a customer tried to get an authorization code for one of our products through our "Code on Demand" system, and the authorization code email never arrived.

We're guessing that it might have been the result of a recent power outage that lasted about 5 minutes longer than our UPS did.

I'm looking for ways to, without using anything above the base OS, to make the box "scream bloody murder" at us, and/or clobber us with a 2x4, as many ways as possible. Obviously, sending an email through MSF wouldn't accomplish anything. And sending it through MailTool, assuming that MailTool can send through GoogleMail (which is what we use for everything else) would require us to buy a permanent authorization code for that product.

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JHHL