I am a us­er of Ar­gus as a mon­i­tor­ing soft­ware. Since it's very flex­i­ble and easy to ex­tend, I want­ed to add MSN alert­s, the same way I had added SMS alerts a while ago. It was eas­i­er than I thought!

1. In­­stall msnlib

2. In­­stall the ex­am­­ple msnbot, mod­­i­­fied so do_­­work is like this:

   def   do_­work():       """      Here you do your stuff and send mes­sages us­ing m.sendms­g()      This is the on­ly place your code lives      """         # wait a bit for ev­ery­thing to set­tle down (sync tak­ing efect       # ba­si­cal­ly)       time.sleep(15)         msg=sys.stdin.read()       for   d   in   sys.argv[3].split('+'):               print   m.sendmsg(d,msg)           # give time to send the mes­sages       time.sleep(30)         # and then quit       quit()  

3. De­fine a cus­tom no­ti­fi­ca­tion in ar­gus like this:

   Method "msn" {
      command: /usr/local/bin/msnbot alerts@mycompany mypass %R >/tmp/XXX 2>&1
      send: %M\n
   }

4. Wher­ev­er you want MSN no­ti­fi­ca­tion­s, add this (on no­ti­fy or es­ca­late di­rec­tives, us­ing as many guys MSN ad­dress­es as you need):

   msn:admin1@hotmai1.com+admin2@hotmai1.com

That's it.