TFS2010: Disable email alert for private builds

We are taking on new developers and encouraging them to use TFS2010's private builds feature - a build is done using a shelveset, so you can see what impact changes will have.

We have TFS set to email the dev team, and that's what's causing the problem: TFS emails the whole team with the result of the private build, which causes confusion over the current state of the 'public' build when a private build fails.

The only difference in the email is that private builds don't label the sources, so the subject line is Scrum Build 8518 failed rather than Scrum Build CI开发者_StackOverflow社区 Build_20111007.5 succeeded. While this is enough to be able to distinguish the two once you're used to it, it's confusing at first.

Is it possible to disable the email alert for private builds? Alternatively, is it possible to change the subject line if the build is private to something more explicit?

I've looked at the JobStatusAgent config and the email templates, but I can't see anything there that will help. We are using the default template, if that's relevant.

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Definitely recommend the Alerts Explorer as suggested by @Edward. You don't need the whole team to install the Power Tools, just a couple of team members to manage Project level Alerts should suffice. With the Alerts Explorer, you can then set up the alert to filter for the Requested By or Requested For fields. In case of Continuous Integration builds, the Requested For field contains the user whose check-in triggered the build. The Requested By field contains the user who requested the build. In case of CI or scheduled builds, this will be the Build Agent service account. Unfortunately, this doesn't really help if you have public builds that are manually requested.

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Are you configuring your alerts with the Alerts Explorer power tool? It's much more powerful than the out-of-the-box alerts functionality.

You can configure more fine-grained configuration on the alerts - for example, Title contains " CI ", build number string matching, or based on the person requesting the builds.

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Please have a look here, where I 've discribe a method to insert a new build argument named "BuildType" into your Build Process Template.

Using this additional parameter we control the sending (or not) of an email to the QA-team.