[Xymon] a mystery

I was having trouble with xymond_alert not sending out all of the emails that it should, it was only doing maybe a quarter of the messages. I checked the alerts.cfg file and didn't find anything. Then I set the --debug flag for xymond_alert and things started working again. I've removed the --debug flag and things are still working correctly. Any ideas on what could have been going wrong here?

Thanks, Larry Barber