You are not alerted by e-mail from a SharePoint Server 2003 site

You configure a Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server Web site to send you an e-mail notification to alert you about changes in a list, in a document library, or on a discussion board. However, you do not receive any e-mail notifications when the changes are made.

This problem occurs when the following conditions are true:

• The Portal Site Name contains a comma or a semicolon.
• The Portal Site Name contains at least two blank spaces.
• The SharePoint site uses a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server to send the e-mail notifications.

The SMTP server may interpret commas and semicolons as address delimiters. Therefore, the SMTP server breaks the name of your SharePoint site into two different, non-resolvable e-mail addresses.

This problem was first fixed in a hotfix that is now contained in a service pack. If you installed the latest SharePoint Portal Server 2003 service pack, you do not have to install the hotfix.

Service pack information

This problem is corrected in Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Service Pack 2.

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for SharePoint Portal Server 2003. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Hotfix information

How to obtain the hotfix

This issue is fixed in the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 post-Service Pack 1 Hotfix Package that is dated September 17, 2004. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

To work around this issue, follow these steps:

1. On the SharePoint Portal site home page, click Site Settings.
2. Click Change portal site properties and SharePoint site creation settings.
3. In the Portal Site Name box, change the portal site name in one of the following ways:
   • Remove the commas and the semicolons from the portal site name.
   • Use the backslash character to escape the commas or the semicolons.
   • Put quotation marks around the portal site name.
4. Click OK.
5. Start Microsoft Internet Explorer.
6. Navigate to the following SharePoint site:
   http://servername/_layouts/1033/ListContentSources.aspx
7. On the Content Source Name menu, click Full Update.
8. Quit Internet Explorer.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section. This problem was first corrected in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Service Pack 2.