The complaint I received from the users was that mail notifications were not being received when work items were created.

After some experimentation it has so far come down to this:

PM created a Work Item and neither he nor the assigned owner received an email. The default mail configurations were in place.

Note that by default the following boxes are checked:
Creator / work item was created or reopened.
Owner / work item was created or reopened.
so everyone expected emails to be generated and they were not.

The following were tried, to no avail:
1) add check mark on Creator / subscriber added or removed.
2) add check mark on Creator / owner started or stopped work on a Work Item

Nextly was tried
3) add check mark on Modifier / work item was created or reopened

And in this case (where the creator and owner were the same) an email was generated.

The expectation is that if Any of the conditions is true then an email is sent. If nothing else, the current behavior seems rather unintuitive.

We are running Rational Team Concert 2.0 I20090618-1753.
Should it matter, the work item type was Task, the template is OpenUP.

I'd ask the PM to run some more tests but he's losing patience.

The work-around is of course telling everyone to do a 'Select All' on the mail configuration panel and keep it that way; Unfortunately other team members are unhappy because 'there are too many emails generated'.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.