Not receiving Alert emails in TFS Projects

Question

Hi 

When users in TFS are not receiving Alert emails for any of the notifications. I tried testing the email feature from TFS Admin console and its working fine (Received email)

We enabled the send email in GUI.. However when we try to verify in command prompt , it shows as disabled.

Answer 1

I was able to reproduce this with a desktop install of Team Foundation Server 2013, version 12.0.30723.0 (Tfs2013.Update3) and 12.0.31101.0 (Tfs2013.Update4).

The command-line help for tfsconfig configuremail says:

TfsConfig configureMail /Enabled:<true|false>
                        /FromEmailAddress:<email address>
                        /SmtpHost:<SMTP host name>

    Changes the From: email address and the SMTP host used for Team Foundation
    Notifications.

I was able to enable or disable email alerts from the command line by setting the Enabled parameter to true or false.

However when I ran the command without the parameter Enabled, it set the "Enable Email Alerts" checkbox to false, and then I got the message "Email alerts disabled."

Notice that this parameter is not mentioned in the documentation.

This behavior seems to be a documentation bug or tool bug, depending on the perspective. It might be that the intended default behavior was to disable alerts if no parameter was passed. If so it needs to be documented.

However, the logical expectation would be for the command without parameters to just show its current Enabled, SMTP Server and Email From Address values. From this perspective this is a bug as it has an unintended and undocumented side effect. You might want to report this at the Microsoft Connect website.

 

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Clementino de Mendonça ALM Ranger

Answer 2

Hi Vinay,  

Thanks for your post.

Please try that helpful suggestion which Clementino provided us.

If still cannot receive the alert, please share your alert definition here.

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Answer 3

Hi Clementino

i tried enabling as mentioned. But still users are not able to receive emails. i verified sending test email from TFS Admin console and its working fine.

Is there a way i can track all the Alert emails sent /failed to send in TFS?

Answer 4

Hi Vinay,  

Thanks for your reply.

Which alert created in your team project, work item alerts? If yes, please create a check-in alert and check result.

And both My alert and Team alert not work in your TFS 2013 Server? 

To troubleshooting alert in TFS, please refer to the steps in this article: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/granth/archive/2009/10/28/tfs2010-diagnosing-email-and-soap-subscription-failures.aspx.

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Answer 5

Hi John

Both the alerts are not working for whole organization. I set My Alerts for Work Item Creation and Updating and i am not receiving emails. Also i dont see error msg in event logs

Regards,
Vinay

Answer 6

Hi Vinay,  

Thanks for your reply.

The “Both the alerts are not working” mean My alert and Team alert both not working?

If you created the default work item alert, please ask another user to update the appropriate work item to check if you can receive the alert, unless you removed the “Authorized As  <>  [Me]” clause from your work item alert’s filters. 

if anther user update work item still cannot trigger the work item alert, please create a check-in(Any checkin occurs in this team project) alert, then perform a check in in your team project to check this check-in alert can works fine or not.

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Answer 7

Hi Vinay,

Have you checked that? If yes, please share the result here.

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Answer 8

HI John

We Disabled the FIPS mode (System cryptography: Use FIPS 140 compliant cryptographic algorithms, including encryption, hashing and signing algorithms) and "restarted Visual Studio Team Foundation Background Job Agent "

It worked fine.

Thanks everyone for your inputs.

Regards,
Vinay

Answer 9

Just host SMTP on the local machine (TFS machine) and put the IP of local machine in Relay section of SMTP along with 127.0.0.1.

I was struggling for the error for hours and finally it fixed up my issue