This isn't a question but I am just submitting to the list that when using the linux 'mail' as most people do, it will sometimes send emails with blank body's and the actual content in a subject_line.dat file. This is due to carriage returns not being stripped from certain alert output (like HTTP or CPU status from Windows machines). The 'mail' command does not know how to deal with this and will not send properly.
To get rid of this issue you need to create a custom alert script and pipe the output through translate to remove any carriage returns (because they are not native to *nix ascii text). An simple example would be (\015 represents a CR):
echo -e "STATUS: RECOVERED\nDATE: date\nSYSTEM: $BBHOSTSVC\nDURATION:
$DOWNSECS\nINFO: $BBH_DESCRIPTION\n\n--\n\n$BBALPHAMSG\n\n" | tr -d '\015' |
/usr/bin/mail -s "RECOVERED: $BBHOSTSVC" $RCPT
OR more simply
echo "alert body whatever you want" | tr -d '\015' | /usr/bin/mail -s "subject of email" recipient_of_email
The important part is the [ tr -d '\015' ] to delete all CR's in the message before it's piped to mail.