id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc	stage	has_patch	needs_docs	needs_tests	needs_better_patch	easy	ui_ux
11565	Rate Limit Error Emails	Andrew Wilkinson	nobody	"We like the emails we receive when an exception occurs on the live site. However, if an error repeatedly occurs (e.g. the database goes down) we get spammed with a huge number of emails.

I'm attaching a patch which will only send an email once every settings.ERROR_EMAIL_RATE_LIMIT minutes for each error. It determines whether it has sent an email about a particular error by taking an MD5 of the traceback and storing it in whatever cache is configured. If the same MD5 already exists in the cache, then it doesn't send an email.

The big problem with this approach is what if your cache starts to produce errors? Certainly memcached is designed so that if the server goes away all keys appear not to be set, rather than an error. I'm not sure about how the database cache backend would work in this situation.

Any suggestions on how to improve the patch are appreciated. If it's ok then I'll produce a patch for the documentation too.

Cheers,
Andrew"		closed	Core (Other)	dev		wontfix		Simon Litchfield	Design decision needed	1	0	1	0	0	0