Sharepoint 2007 Alerts are not working

Finally I managed to resolve this problem in my case.

Issue:
We have implemented a MOSS solution which contains a few custom lists. We have also configured alerts and customized them to suit the customer’s requirements.

Alerts were working fine but about suddenly they stopped working for one particular list. Alerts are working for all other lists/document libraries/etc. without any issues. If we check the content DB of MOSS, we can see the alerts are getting created successfully. But the emails are not being sent. We get confirmation emails that a new alert has been created, so message flow seems solid.

So, I then took a backup (by creating a List template with content), and recreated a new list with the same data and configuration. Alerts are working fine in the new list which has the same configuration and data. But with this approach we will lose Created/Modified and Author/Editor details.

Solution:

So, to resolve this issue I restarted the SPTimerV3 service (windows SharePoint timer), restarted IIS in all the servers. Thought this will resolve alerts issue. But no luck. Also, rebooted the machine (I know it doesn't make any sense but we wanted to try it) “

So, did google search and tried all the options provided in the following articles.... Also, contacted Microsoft support to help us out on this. But they are not sure about the problem.

http://weblogs.asp.net/mellota/archive/2007/10/11/sharepoint-2007-task-notification-alert-emails-not-working.aspx
http://www.moss2007.be/blogs/vandest/archive/2007/11/23/sharepoint-immediate-alert-notifications-stopped-working.aspx
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2150023&SiteID=1
http://suguk.org/forums/thread/6756.aspx
http://www.sharepointblogs.com/mindykelly/archive/2007/08/01/alerts-not-working-in-moss.aspx

As none of the option above help me to resolve the problem. So, thought of deleting the list and recreating list by losing out Created/Modified and Author/Editor details. But to my luck, I wanted to try removing all the alerts in the portal and test.

So, I created an application which will allow to take backup/restore all the alerts in the portal. After taking backup of all the alerts in the portal. I deleted all the alerts and then created one sample alert and tested, to my luck Alerts started working without any issue.

So, I restored all the alerts back without any issue. Now Alerts are being sent from the "troubled" list. Looks to you bit silly. But it is true... if you are working on MOSS 2007, be prepared for these kind of issues.

I hope this post will help someone, as I spent many frustrating days to resolve this issue.

Posted in: Alerts, MOSS, SharePoint