Troubleshooting Alerts
Troubleshooting SharePoint Alerts – Primer
November 27th, 2009 by Ryan
To make best use of the guide to troubleshooting why SharePoint Alert emails stop working its helpful to
have an little understanding of what is going on under the covers.
For our purposes Email Alerts can be split into two types
Confirmation Emails
When you first setup an alert a confirmation email is sent to the recipient of the alerts.
This email is sent immediately from the Web Front End (WFE) serving the page at that time and running
under the Identity that the IIS worker process (w3wp.exe) is using.
Email Alerts
The “Windows SharePoint Services Timer” service (owstimer.exe) is responsible for various jobs including
sending out email alerts
By default this runs every 5 minutes – this means that even when you set “Send e-mail immediately” its not
really immediately, there could be a short wait for your emails to be sent.
What does mean for Troubleshooting?
These two types of email are being sent at different times from different components of SharePoint and
often using different Identities running on different servers.
(Tip – if you are brave you can check the TimerLock table to see on which server your various timer jobs
will run)
So just because you get the Confirmation Emails you can’t assume that the Email Alerts will be work (and
vice-versa) : There may be a problem stopping the SharePoint timer job running that doesn’t affect the
confirmation emails.
 There may be a problem with the configuration of the alerts that only effects the alert emails
 Does your email infrastructure may not allow the emails to be relayed from the server the timer job
runs on but does allow the WFE
 Does your anti-virus software stop emails being sent from the server/process (owstimer.exe) or
even user identity that the timer service jobs run under but allows the confirmation emails
You get the idea! For troubleshooting purposes you should treat them quite separately.
Tags
2003 alert alert ad Alert Administration Tools Alert Me Alerts Alert Tools Commercial Alert Tools Date
Format End User Alert Tools Formatting OOTB Primer Recipients SMTP Jobs
Troubleshooting Tutorial Upgrade URLWSS2
Categories
 Alert Administration Tools
 Alert Tools
 Commercial Alert Tools
 End User Alert Tools
 Tricks and Tips
 Troubleshooting Alerts
 Uncategorized
Categories
 Alert Administration Tools
 Alert Tools
 Commercial Alert Tools
 End User Alert Tools
 Tricks and Tips
 Troubleshooting Alerts
 Uncategorized
Recent Posts
 Troubleshooting – Email when ownership is assigned and Read Access : Only their own
 Troubleshooting – Emails from an Approval Workflow are sent in unformatted text
 Troubleshooting SharePoint Alerts – Timer Jobs
 Troubleshooting SharePoint Alerts – Upgrade from 2003 to 2010
 Troubleshooting SharePoint Alerts – User List and List Permissions
Troubleshooting SharePoint Alerts
A common theme running through the SharePoint newsgroups is the frustration of troubleshooting
SharePoint Alerts such as when they stop working altogether or work intermittently.
I am trying to organize a comprehensive step-by-step troubleshooting guide that should help solve the
most common problems. It’s a work in progress so if you know of anything that should be added then let
me know by adding a comment.
Please Note – this guide is for the Out of the Box (OOTB) alerts in SharePoint.
Troubleshooting Flowchart
Flowchart in text form
The first step is to ensure you understand the difference between Confirmation Emails and Alert Emails.
Are you getting any emails?
 No
o Check email infrastructure
o Check SharePoint Timer Jobs
 Yes – carry on to
Which best describes your symptoms?
 Getting initial Confirmation Emails but no Alert Emails
o Check email infrastructure
o Check SharePoint timer Jobs
o Check list permissions
 Getting emails for some users but not others
o Check SharePoint user list and List Permissions
o Check email infrastructure
 Intermittent Problem
o Check email infrastructure in particular take note that timer jobs may run on different
servers in your farm.
 You have upgraded from 2003 to 2007 and are no longer getting emails
 You are getting emails but there is some problem with them
Further Reading
61 Responses to “Troubleshooting”