Ok... you've convinced me... I was implementing a trigger that would email if certain rules were met.

I'm not saying that sending notifications to users (or running some other process) on data change is a bad idea. Although I think this is not the best way to handle things, that's a separate discussion. I'm focusing on the use of a trigger to drive these external events.

I hope you're writing that discussion soon.... How else would you do it without getting in a tangled mess (in this case, I filter the INSERTED rows and do a EXEC(sqlstatement) based on matches in a trig_rules table -- It seems that it would be hard to pass off a copy of INSERTED that would be "safe" if the trigger were to fire multiple times quickly:sick? 

Does the "if it fails, it gets rolled back" apply to an AFTER trigger?