The "View All Items" privilege is ignored for notifications if the privilege is only granted to a user via a group that inherits the privilege from a role. If the user is added to the role directly, the privilege is honored and he or she will receive the notification.
The JVM timezone gets shifted to GMT by either SLA or SSF (part of common services since 10.1.1.4) that is installed on the server running the Notification Server, but this is done after the DB driver initialization which causes the Notification Server to think it is getting times in GMT when it is actually not which can cause date/time issues in notification emails.
