Dynamic email subjects with Elmah?

Question

I'm using the errorMail functionality of Elmah to send an email when ASP.NET encounters an error. It allows you to configure the SMTP settings as well as hard-code a sender, recipient, and subject.

My question is: can I use a dynamic subject ? Specifically, I would like to use the Exception.Message property as my subject, so that I can tell what the error is about just from the subject line of the email.

There is no documentation, and from a quick scan of the source code it looks impossible without modifying the code, but I thought I would ask the question anyways.

Relevant source code:

• ErrorMailModule.cs
• ErrorMailHtmlFormatter.cs

Answer 1

Doh! Answer is on line 454 of ErrorMailModule.cs :

string subjectFormat = Mask.EmptyString(this.MailSubjectFormat, "Error ({1}): {0}");
mail.Subject = string.Format(subjectFormat, error.Message, error.Type)
                .Replace('\r', ' ')
                .Replace('\n', ' ');

You can use {0} for the message and {1} for the type.

Answer 2

I've changed the email subject from the web.config file in this way:

<errorMail from="..." subject="Some subject: {0}">

where {0} will be the exception message.

You can check this article for more details http://weblogs.asp.net/jeffwids/format-the-email-subject-in-the-elmah-error-logging-module