I can't think of a reason why you wouldn't want to make use of database mail. I enable database mail on all the servers in our estate as part of the initial setup so I can send a number of reports and alerts for various events. Enabling and configuring database mail is not service impacting as no service restart is required so is entirely safe to do in production.

Your ideal of using an IF statement and sp_send_dbmail is exactly how I achieve this combined with a SQL Agent job to run on schedule. I have several posts on my blog that do this the one below is for unused indexes, feel free to amend the script to suit.

http://sqlserver365.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/unused-indexes.html

Cheers

Chris