Different ways of sending e-mail from linux command line

Question

For our web projects, we need a reliable e-mail distribution mechanism. Due to bad experiences in the past, I have written a bash script (executed hourly) which sends a notification e-mail if

1. the qmail-send process is not running
2. there are too many failures in the mail log

For sending the notification e-mail I obviously don't want to depend on qmail, since qmail will be unavailable if the qmail-send process is not running. However, the following command sends the notification e-mail via qmail:

echo "failure rate critical" | mail -s "qmail notification" my@email.com

What's the easiest way to send e-mail from the linux command line without qmail? Can I use sendmail?

If you guys have smarter alarm systems to monitor qmail, please let me know.