MOSS 2007 Alerts Demystified

One of the weird issues I have faced with MOSS 2007 Alerts is simply it is not sending out alerts for users, in the following lines I will give the symptoms of the issue and how I could resolve it.

Symptoms

As administrator, I click Alert Me and add myself and other concerned users to be notified with changes of a certain list, I get an email indicating that I have a new alert registered to the list and all other users get a similar email, the issue arises when changes are done and no emails are sent to the users.
If I would rephrase the symptoms I would write ( this is for folks searching the problem ), Alerts are created successfully, but the emails are not sent.

Resolution

After some searching I found that so many other people encountered the same and walked through some workarounds such as breaking the permissions of the list and re-inheriting it, but this did not work.

I found one solution among the lines of ObjectMix forums, that I have found after searching for too long, I tried the solution and it simply worked, herein the steps for solution that worked for me:

• Browse to Central Administration -> Operations -> Timer Job Definitions



• Try to spot a job titled " Immediate Alerts " for your web application, noting that you may find the job for some other applications hosted on the same server.

• Most likely, you will not find this job, and this is the reason SharePoint is not sending out alerts when the list items are changed.



• To add this job definition you will need to run the following two commands in STSADM.



• Run STSADM and enter the following commands ( you can change the parameters and frequency of alerts sending accordingly, in the below command it is sending every two minutes ) :

stsadm.exe -o setproperty -url http://mywss30server/mysite -pn alerts-enabled -pv true
stsadm.exe -o setproperty -url http://mywss30server/mysite -pn job-immediate-alerts -pv "every 2 minutes"

Voila!, now you should be ready to receive all the alerts emails that have been queued before because the job was not running, for me I have receieved about 50 emails.

If you check the job definitions now, you will find the new job added under immediate alerts