I've been using a job failure email notification method for some years now on SQL 2000 with the following differences:

1) I don't use a monitor server to check the other servers, but rather just include a final email failure step on each job, only executing this step if a previous step fails. That way I avoid the linked server problems mentioned in the article and I keep it simple. (The one disadvantage is if the server goes down, no email gets sent; whereas a central monitoring server solution can catch this. But our operations unit knows within seconds if a server goes down, so not a problem for me.)

2) On my SQL 2000 servers, I don't use SQLMail because a) it requires a MAPI client and b) it's flaky (often started failing after months of no problems). I replaced it with an smtp solution developed by Gert Drapers (formerly a software architect for Microsoft) called xp_smtp_sendmail. I've used it for years and it is very robust, has never failed once.