The following users do not have email address specified

Problem Description:
Unable to set alert on a List for single or multiple users

Error Message:
The following users do not have email address specified: <Username>

Probable cause:
The user’s profiles are not updated in SharePoint even though everything is setup up correctly in Active Directory and in Exchange.

Troubleshooting done:

• Checked if the user is stamped with an email address automatically.
• If the user's email address is set manually, need to remove the exchange attributes and reconnect the mailbox after running the cleanup agent in exchange, or create a new mailbox if there was no mailbox for the user in exchange server.
• Email address is stamped automatically by recipient update service (RUS) a component of exchange server and hence one should not add the email address manually.
• When configuring alert, check if the users email address is listed in the people picker. In this case the email address was not displayed; however the email address was stamped automatically by exchange. ( The affected user's email address was not
• displayed, but the user who was receiving alerts success had email address displayed in the people picker)
• Tried sending a test email from telnet to the affected user and it got delivered successfully which meant that the exchange was working fine.

Resolution:

• Went to Central Admin -> SSP -> User profiles and properties -> Configure profile import: The default access account was not specified.
• Hence gave the enterprise administrator and the password as the default access account.
• Then Selected Start Full import under SSP -> User profiles and properties.
• We were then able to see all the users with their email address in View user profiles.
• Then went to the SSP->Search Settings -> Content sources and Crawl schedules.
• Performed a Full crawl which completed successfully.
• We then selected the people picker and found that the all the users were displayed with their email address along with the affected user.
• We were then able to set the alert for that user successfully without getting any errors.

Applies to: SharePoint Server 2007-SP2