Recently I was making a workshop to train a client to better use their collaboration environment. Since they will also get some new fresh branding I needed screenshots from the development environment.
I was making a nice fluffy slide regarding the "Alert Me" feature and this was the moment I could not find the little yellow alarm bell? The silly thing was that in the production environment it was there and working I only needed new screenshots.
I know if the icon might be greyed-out it will be a permission issue for sure only now it was not even showing up this time.
The eureka moment
It turned out that in the development environment the "Outgoing e-mail setting" was not configured in the Central Administration. As soon as I filled out some bogus server the Alert Me icon appeared in the ribbon for Lists and Libraries.
That was the end of another exciting adventure.