Send e-mail from a trigger

First you need to set up database mail – if you haven’t done so, this question might help:

• Scripting setup of database mail

Then you need a trigger:

CREATE TRIGGER dbo.whatever
ON dbo.wherever
FOR INSERT
AS
BEGIN
    SET NOCOUNT ON;

    IF EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM inserted WHERE speed > 100)
    BEGIN
        EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail
          @recipients="[email protected]", 
          @profile_name="default",
          @subject="Someone was speeding", 
          @body = 'Yep, they sure were.';
    END
END
GO

Now, you’re probably going to say you want data from the insert to be actually be included in the e-mail. And your first inclination is going to be to declare some local variables and assign them from inserted – this doesn’t work because your trigger could be responding to a multi-row insert. So the right way to do this is:

CREATE TRIGGER dbo.whatever
ON dbo.wherever
FOR INSERT
AS
BEGIN
    SET NOCOUNT ON;

    DECLARE @body NVARCHAR(MAX) = N'';

    SELECT @body += CHAR(13) + CHAR(10) + RTRIM(some_col) FROM inserted;

    IF EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM inserted WHERE speed > 100)
    BEGIN
        EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail
          @recipients="[email protected]", 
          @profile_name="default",
          @subject="At least one person was speeding", 
          @body = @body;
    END
END
GO

That all said, I am not a big fan of sending e-mail from a trigger. Even though database mail uses service broker and so is asynchronous, I would be much more inclined to populate a queue table, and have a background thread that comes around and sends all of the appropriate e-mails. The twothree nice things about this are:

1. you minimize the potential delays in committing the outer transaction that fired the trigger – the more complicated your logic in the trigger, the slower you make that process.
2. since it is probably not essential that the e-mail is sent the microsecond the row is inserted, you can easily fluctuate the timing of the background process – this avoids having to check the table very minute, all day, when very few times it will ever have to actually do anything.
3. As @goodeye pointed out, keeping this process separate can prevent errors in the e-mail part of the process from interfering with the original DML (in their case, an invalid parameter to sp_send_dbmail – which I inadvertently suggested – prevented the insert).