Sharepoint Alerts sending wrong information in emails

Question

I have a Document Library named Project Files where details of all our projects are uploaded. As many users refer to the files on this library, they have alerts for new documents added when changes made to existing ones.

Recently, in some of the alerts, users are getting wrong information.

When I can check the version history of these items and I find that there haven't been any changes, so the doubt that the details existed earlier and then were changed is also eliminated.

These alerts are not even workflow based, so I doubt this is due to some manual error.

Is it a server side error?

Can someone help me solve this?

Answer 1

Details on how alerts theoretically work is available on the MSDN Blog. This also includes information on the tables used for alerts in the underlying content database, which could give you some insight into why the incorrect alerts were sent. The article is for 2007 but applies to 2010 as alerts did not change significantly between the two versions.

I wish I had something more encouraging to say but alerts in SharePoint are more akin to a mystic art than to technology. They are well known for firing when they want, firing multiple times for unchanged items and sometimes for not firing at all.