Enterprise Library Email Trace Listener is killing our mail server

Question

We're doing stress testing of our application right now and when it blows up we wind up hammering our Exchange server with exception notifications sent via EntLib 4.0 Email Trace Listener.

What strategies can we use to throttle the emails being sent. Is there anything in EntLib for this or does it have to be something configured in Exchange? I'm hoping this can be solved in our App so we don't have to tell the client to make changes to their email server config.

It's either that, or we just disable the Email Trace Listener, which I don't think is a very good option at all.

Answer 1

You should ask yourself what the objective of logging through email was. Then you can adjust the level of severity of log messages (Critical, Error, Warning, Info etc) that need to go through to meet your logging objectives. Notice, 'All' is the default option. You can do this at the level of the TraceListener or by setting up Filters on log categories.

Answer 2

The e-mail trace listener is really geared up for high throughput of notifications. If you are getting huge numbers of exceptions then this may not be the appropriate mechanism for you.