Problems with sending notification emails from SQL Server 2008

Question

Hi, I have a problem setting up email notifications in SQL Server 2008.

I am using SQL Server 2008 to build a data cube. This process consists of several jobs, that are all scheduled to run each night at a specific time. To see whether a job was running without any failure, it is possible to set up email notification.

Unfortunately, no email is sent even though I think I have set up database mail correctly.

All guides I can found just explains, how to set up database mail (eg. http://blog.sqlauthority.com/2008/08/23/sql-server-2008-configure-database-mail-send-email-from-sql-database/), but thats it.
If I sent a mail to test functionality (via test email button or from T-SQL script) it works just fine and the email arrives. But when using the notification feature in a job, it doesn't even create a sysmail_mailitems or sysmail_log entry.
I have also send an email using sp_notify_operator, successfully. So the operator set up seems to work, too. (Thanks, Joe Stefanelli, for the hint.)

There is a great workaround written for SQL Server 2005, that works for me, too: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/database/sending-automated-job-email-notifications-in-sql-server-with-smtp/, but why isn't it possible to just use that build-in functionality?

Does anyone knows if there is anything else to do, to make that email notification task work properly? Thanks in advise.

Answer 1

To send email notifications from agent jobs in SQL Server Agent, the alarm system must be activated. We did that. After restarting the agent, the Database Mail system should be used. Unfortunately, this does not work. The agent was still trying to reach a Mapi profile (as in SQL 2000).

The following registry value wasn't set: "UseDatabaseMail"=dword:00000001
After setting it to 1, the database mail system was used.
You can do that in SQL server, directly:

EXEC master.dbo.xp_instance_regwrite N'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE', N'SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\SQLServerAgent', N'UseDatabaseMail', N'REG_DWORD', 1