Drupal's notifications module is pretty darn useful, but, you need to have some methods for testing it otherwise you will wait days for updates.
One of the simplest little tricks is making sure that you receive an update immediately, just delete your user's entry from the notifications_sent table. This means that you have no history of updates, and the system will think you are due an email.
mysql> delete from notifications_sent where uid = 128499 limit 1;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
