Hi,
I don't think continuum or other build systems respond out of the box to email notifications. I hope I am wrong about it. I think I have to be tho.
We are running continuum in-house for a few month now and all I can say is, that builds are not created if there has not been any activity. In fact, Continuum does an SVN update (in our) case and does nothing if there has not been a commit since the last build. Regards Felix