Modify Alert Appearance

Scenario:
As always my client got a new idea, he didn't like the out of box email format and wanted to modify the appearance of the Alert message he get from SharePoint. Infact that was the reason he hired me. :-)

Steps:
1. Navigate to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\XML\
2. Make a copy of AlertTemplates.xml ( not to lose it )
3. Open the file using Visual Studio or Notepad
4. Edit the appearance of alert by modifying the XSLT as required for specific kind of list type.
5. One done , execute

STSADM -o updatealerttemplates -url http://servername -filename NewAlertTemplates.xml

Articles:
Modifying the Appearance of Alerts

Issues:
Governance issue - above solution require you to modify the system file so make sure you have good plan when new SP comes , other wise your changes will be wiped off... and yes there is no other way to modify the alert template.