To *send* a message, all SMTP requires is the sender's email address and the mail server's IP address - think about it, you don't need to know the recipent's "password" to *send* them a message . . . . If you happen to have a mailserver on your local area network - pretty trivial to setup - just setup a mailbox with the printer's name . . . There are plenty of free mailservers out there for windows or *nix, setting them up to communicate on the *internet*, or beyond your local area network, becomes a bit complicated:
1) You need a domain name - implying that there are DNS records pointing to specific IP address' corresponding to services your domain provides (WWW, FTP, Mail)
2) You need your Domain's MX (mail exchanger) record to point to your internal mailserver, or more accurately, your router's IP address. This implies that you have a fixed IP address - usually an additional periodic charge from your ISP.
3) You need to configure your router to "forward" all IP traffic on TCP ports 25 and 110 to your internal mailserver's IP address.
4) You need to configure your internal mailserver to relay only messages originating from your internal local area network - allowing your mailserver to relay all traffic is sure to put your domain's on email blacklists.
5) In today's environment, you need to ensure that rDNS (reverse DNS) resolves to the same domain name as your mailserver - failing to do so will result in delays or rejection from large e-mail providers such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, AOL, etc.
HP's networked printer products have supported monitoring and event reporting for years (via SNMP, different TCP ports but same idea) - it works great - but routing that information out of your network requires a bit of networking knowledge . . .
hth - John