Troubleshooting Alerts

Troubleshooting SharePoint Alerts – Primer
November 27th, 2009byRyan
To make best use of the guide to troubleshootingwhy SharePoint Alert emails stop workingits 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 theTimerLocktable 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 purposesyou should treat them quite separately.
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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 thedifference between Confirmation Emails and Alert Emails.
Are you getting any emails?
  • No
  • Check email infrastructure
  • Check SharePoint Timer Jobs
  • Yes – carry on to
Which best describes your symptoms?
  • Getting initial Confirmation Emails but no Alert Emails
  • Check email infrastructure
  • Check SharePoint timer Jobs
  • Check list permissions
  • Getting emails for some users but not others
  • CheckSharePoint user list and List Permissions
  • Check email infrastructure
  • Intermittent Problem
  • Check email infrastructurein 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

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