SMTP appender throttling?

[Michael Mason <mi...@digitalrum.com>]

Hi,

We've been using log4j for a while now and use it on several production
systems. We've set up an SMTP appender so serious error messages are emailed
to us. This means we get prodded and take action to fix the problem, and can
be slightly lazier than if we had to continually check log files.

We've had situations where something has gone seriously wrong (such as the
DB server going away) which generate lots and lots of error messages. We've
found that the email generated by the logging of these messages actually
swamps our office incoming net connection, the mail gets backed up at our
ISP, bandwidth is wasted at colo, and general nastiness occurs.

What I'd really like is to be able to throttle the messages in some way.
Something along the lines of "only send 100 mail messages per minute" or
"send only 100k of mail per minute" or "batch messages and never send more
than 1 email per second" or something in between would be good.

Can log4j do this? Is it a useful thing to be able to do, or are we simply
doing the Wrong Thing using SMTP in this way, and something else (e.g.
remote syslog) would be better?

If log4j can't (yet) do this and it isn't an insane idea, I guess my next
stop is log4j-dev... ;-)

Cheers,
Mike.

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