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 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.
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.