Recently I began troubleshooting an issue on one of our servers. The issue is that the alerts I set up for jobs and on the server itself weren't sending emails to the operator I configured. This was happening for a while but I never had time to look at it in detail until now. And besides, I kept a close eye on the server so I would know if there were any problems. I had our other servers set up the same way, and none of them were having any issues. All the servers were using the same email account, and I set up all the database profiles to be identical. And I never had issues sending emails using send_dbmail.
So of course I checked and rechecked all the email account settings against a server that worked. I even went so far as deleting the email profile and creating a new one. Nothing I did had any effect. Finally I did what I should have done in the first place; check to see if the SQL Agent had email enabled for alerts. Sure enough if didn't.
The moral of my story is to start at the beginning when troubleshooting, no matter how basic it seems.
