Did originally read doccumentation, which said that was a Joomla 1.5 issue. I will now assume that it also applies to J 3.x.
I've added the languange overrides per the documentation, and got the expected message "Notice -- Empty message body", and no resulting email. case closed.
Thanks for your quick reply.
@ powerj9, the documentation provides text to be added to a specific file, which basically makes the email subject line and message body "blank", which results in an "error" and therefore no email is actually sent.