email notifications

i am having trouble setting things up so that i get an email notification when one of my monitors is triggered. i went into configuratin template, hit profiles and then created a new profile. In the new profile i created a ping monitor. i then created a condition that triggers an alert when any condition is met. i created a condition where a server is down for 5 seconds. i then went into alerts and created a new alert. In the alert i added my email address in the additional recipients. i also made sure that in my new profile i have my alert selected under “use alert settings”. im not understanding why im not getting email alerts when my servers go down.