TFS ships with an event subscription tool that you can access through command line and it’s located at “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server\TF Setup”. You can use it to subscribe to a variety of TFS events dealing with builds, check-ins, projects, work items, etc. You can subscribe to a handful of events from the team project node in team explorer, but this gives you a much bigger list. In order to get notifications when the build fails or partially succeeds (which means that your assemblies built, but your tests failed), you would do the following:
bissubscribe /eventType BuildCompletionEvent /address you@email.com /deliveryType EmailHtml /server yourTfsServer /filter “TeamProject = ‘TeamProjectName’ AND (CompletionStatus=’Failed’ OR CompletionStatus=’Partially Succeeded’)”
There’s also a UI for it in CodePlex that will allow you to do the same if you don’t want to deal with command line.