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Configure Email Notifications and Specify the SMTP Server

You can help team members learn about changes to projects, work items, and builds if you configure email notifications. Team members can then specify the email notifications that they want to receive about various types of changes to projects, work items, and build events. To support email notifications, you must configure Team Foundation Server to use an existing SMTP server to send email alerts. You can perform this task by using either the administration console for Team Foundation or the ConfigureMail Command command.

Important

If you used a system account (such as Network Service) as the service account for Team Foundation Server, you must configure your SMTP server to allow anonymous senders to send email. If you do not configure the server, email notifications will not be sent.

You can also customize the content and format of Team Foundation Server alert emails. For more information, see Customize the Mail Alert Format for Work Item Changes.

Required Permissions

To perform this procedure, you must be a member of the Administrators and Team Foundation Administrators groups on the Team Foundation application-tier server. For more information, see Team Foundation Server Permissions.

Note

If the server is running Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista, to follow a command-line procedure, you may need to open an elevated Command Prompt window. To perform this task, click Start, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as Administrator. For more information, see the Microsoft Web site: User Account Control.

To configure email notifications by using the administration console

  1. Open the administration console for Team Foundation.

    For more information, see Open the Team Foundation Administration Console.

  2. Under Team Foundation, expand the name of the server, and then click Application Tier.

  3. Under Application Tier, under Email Alert Settings, click Alert Settings.

    The Email Alert Settings window opens.

  4. Select the Enable Email Alerts check box.

  5. In SMTP Server, type the name of the SMTP server that you want to use.

  6. In Email From Address, type the name of the email account from which alerts will be sent, and then click OK.

    Note

    You must specify both the email address from which the alerts will be sent and the SMTP server.

To configure email alerts by using the ConfigureMail command

  1. On the application-tier server, open a Command Prompt window and change to the directory that contains the TFSConfig utility.

    By default, this utility is located in Drive:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio v10.0 Team Foundation Server\Tools.

  2. At the command prompt, type the following command and then press ENTER:

    **TFSConfig ConfigureMail /FromEmailAddress:**EmailAddress **/SmtpHost:**SMTPHostName

    You must specify both the "from address" for email notifications from Team Foundation Server (EmailAddress) and the name of the server that hosts the SMTP mail server (SMTPHostName).

See Also

Tasks

Customize the Mail Alert Format for Work Item Changes

Reference

ConfigureMail Command

Concepts

The Team Foundation Administration Console

Other Resources

Configuring Resources to Support Team Projects