The concurrency structure of the main command loop is brittle

[bam365]

Currently we have two channels, one for messages to stdout and one for alerts, which in addition to printing a message to stdout will also send emails. If code running as a result of an alert sends a message to the message channel, the program will hang. Need to figure out a way to fix that. A simple but not very good solution would be to buffer the message channel, but I think there's a better way.