[hueving]

>As a sysadmin, I typically receive something on the order of 1,000 to 10,000 emails daily

Sorry, but you're not a very good sysadmin then. You have chosen poor tools or do not understand how to distill the information. Knowing that, I can see why you think email alerts don't work. They are effectively broken FOR YOU.

[ersii]

And you don't think vendors have a responsibility to reflect upon the way they do alerts and/or service monitoring?

It's usually not the system administrators that get to decide what the Corporate Overlords purchases or who they do business with. So I think it's pretty unfair to blame the admins for "choosing poor tools".