Notifications Sent Even If Alerts Are Disabled

Hello all,

Here's the problem I'm trying to solve:

I have several alerts set up and a job setup to notify via email if alerts occur. There are times when I might be doing maintenace on a box that may generate alerts but I don't want to get emailed or paged for these "dummy" alerts. I thought first of setting the enabled column of sysalerts to 0 - that doesn't work. I still get notified. Then I thought I'd set the enabled column in sysjobs for my notification job to 0 while I'm doing the work. But as soon as I re-enable the job I get an alert. It seems that as soon as the job is re-enabled it checks the NT application log and sees that an alert was fired and somehow knows that there was no notification sent so sends one. If I purge the NT application log before re-enabling the job is solves the problem. But that is a very in-ellegant solution and I don't want to loose all the info stored in the event log any way. Does anyone know how SQL SErver aggent keeps track of this stuff? (ie. that an alert was fired but it's response job is disabled and to check once a job is re-enabled to see if any alerts occured while it was disabled?) I did a Profiler trace while re-enabling the job but didn't see anything pertinant in there.

Thanks in advance.

Patrick