Alerts and other emails taking too long to arrive?

On a SharePoint development environment or for demo purposes you don't want to wait 5 minutes (or whatever the default is) to receive alerts and other SharePoint emails. To make sure that these arrive every minute, you need to update the property of the immediate jobs alert timer.

This is done by running the following command:

stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname job-immediate-alerts -url http://yoursite -propertyvalue "every 1 minutes"

This is not a good idea in live environments because you have your content database being queried every minute!