yes they can send an email.
I use this feature.
But:
- you don't always have an access to your email, so receiving a SMS is nice (assuming you always have your cell phone with you)
- if the thief cuts the land line, then it's really useful to use a GSM, it will always work
- if the thief cuts the whole power, then you can also trigger that and send the notification by GSM (assuming you have a "battery" for the PC)
For this you just need a dedicated old cell phone thay you let forever beside the PC, and a cheap 1$/month subsciption just for that purpose.
When there is a senario triggered from AHP, it can call a .bat file, that will use gammu to send an alert by SMS.
It could even provide the name of the senario as a parameter, so you know which one is involved.
On top of the X10 story, You can also build your own small software that:
1) detects whether the internet connection is broken (if the thief cut the land line) to send the SMS (quite easy, just need to ping a website for instance or any other means).
2) detects whether the power is down (if the thief cut the whole power). One means: with gammu, you can know from the GSM whether it is connected to the power or to the battery only...
Another solution from outside if you have a web server at home.
You can ping your internal web server from an external web site (just need to host a website outside).
If your internal web server does not respond, then you know there is a problem.
Rod