If your alerts stop working below you will find the solution that works for me. Also I have created a custom handler to take care of the 70 character
stsadm -o updatealerttemplates -url -f “c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\XML\alerttemplates.xml” -LCID 2057″
stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname alerts-enabled -propertyvalue false -url
stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname alerts-enabled -propertyvalue true [...]