log4net SmtpAppender on mono

I have some problems with the SmtpAppender of log4net on mono. I couldn’t figure out what was going wrong, it just wasn’t sending any e-mails.

With a bit googling, I found a nice trick that lets you run log4net in ‘debug’ mode. You have to set the appSetting log4net.Internal.Debug to true:

<appSettings>
    <add key="log4net.Internal.Debug" value="true" />
</appSettings>

With that, you’ll get detailed output of log4net on the console. In there, I found why no e-mails were being set: something about CallContextData not implemented… I guess I’ve hit on something that isn’t implemented on mono? I don’t know and I don’t care.

All I really want is to receive an e-mail when my app logs an error. That’s it. So I put together a small custom appender that does just exactly what I want:

public class SmtpAppenderThatWorks : AppenderSkeleton
{
    public string To { get; set; }
    public string From { get; set; }
    public string Subject { get; set; }

    protected override void Append(LoggingEvent e)
    {
        using (SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient())
        {
            using (var msg = new MailMessage(From, To))
            {
                msg.Subject = Subject;
                msg.Body = RenderLoggingEvent(e);
                client.Send(msg);
            }
        }
    }
}

Note that the only settings you can set are the e-mail subject and the sender and receiver e-mail addresses. I leave the smtp host and authentication to be handled by the standard system.net configuration section.

No buffering support, nothing fancy, just a small appender that actually works in mono. I used this article on CodeProject as a guide to write the appender.

The configuration looks like this:

<appender name="SmtpAppender" type="Test.SmtpAppenderThatWorks">
    <layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout">
        <conversionPattern value="%newline%date [%thread] %-5level %logger - %message%newline%newline%newline" />
    </layout>
    <threshold value="ERROR" />

    <to value="recipient@mydomain.com" />
    <from value="noreply@mydomain.com" />
    <subject value="Exception report" />
</appender>