Yes, typically, I would have jobs on the various servers in Agent and they would normally email (we used SQLAnswersMail on SQL Server 2000 because it has nice HTML formatting and allows you to a lot of flexibility).

The jobs would email the appropriate people when they detected problems. Some would be daily, weekly or monthly. The emails were always designed to go to the people who would fix the problem and be sent on behalf of the people who could answer any questions (sometimes these are the same person!)). Preferably the bad data was a link to a web based application's maintenance page where the problem could be corrected.

I always liked to ensure that the addresses for the recipients were either a mailing list or stored in a table (or sometimes the email address was extracted from the system - like the person who was the rep for the customer) so that the job never needed to be changed for simple job assignment changes. In cases wherre the rep for a customer had to do something, there was a fallback so that if the rep's email address was NULL (or the rep was terminated), it would go to the department head (and then, if that wasn't available, to a DBA). So even the jobs were anticipating problems with the integrity of their email configuration, to some extent.