REQ: pgagent to send out alert/emails if error occurs

Hi All,

Thanks to Dave Page's instruction, I'm not a pretty happy camper with
pgadmin's pgagent. It provides a graphical interface to for the NON-nix
inclined people. (otherwise a sh script would have done nicely)

Anyway.. I've got a request and I'm not sure if this has been talked
about or.... (trawling the internet, I can't really find any/much docs
on pgagent) For the pgagent jobs, there are 3 options to choose from

* Fail
* Suceed
* Ignore

If fail, the whole job fails. If Suceed, it will go on, and ignore. it
will ignore and go on. (actually, to be frank, I'm confused as to diff
between succeed and ignore, but anyway, I digress)

The crux of the issue is actually when an error does occur, be it via
duplicate primary key values or X, the job will just be marked as FAIL
and it continues happily along for the next step (if I mark it as
ignore). Problem is, this error will just stay there and _not_ get fixed
because no alert is sent out and unless someone goes in to check on the
status. By that time, the job is already stale and old.

I've tried to look at possibility to get some kind of mail-sending
capability, and I found pgsendmail and pgmail, but in my testing, it
didn't really work.

Hence I'm asking here for other methods or if I can make a "feature"
request for pgagent.

PS : I've read somewhere about using LISTEN/NOTIFY processes, but am
unclear as to _what_ it is exactly..

Thanks