It goes without saying that you don’t want some propietary commit info to be sent in notification emails so if a developer requests this sort of set up ask a few questions about what data will be needed.  Also, add yourself to the notification list for a little while to see how the developers are using the tool.

Also, this is usually a beginner level issue, be sure that your box is configured to relay mail out.  A simple test message like below should get you an email in your inbox(check junk and spam filters).

Enter this as one line:

echo "test body" | mailx -s "test subject" blah@domain.com,distrolist@domain.com