Celery 2.3 has a few high level knobs to turn with regards to exception emails. You can whitelist exceptions by type. You can change the recipients, email servers to use, etc. But there are many powerful things that you couldn't do, until now.

Starting with the next release, you will be able to define a custom error mail handler at the task level. From there, you can do lots of new things. You could blacklist exceptions per-task. You can change the subject of body formatting of the errors. You can hijack the email and submit the content to github as a bug, if you want.

The mechanism for all this is the ErrorMail class, which is defined in utils.mail. Every task has a Task.ErrorMail property which designates a handler for its exception emails. By setting that property to a new class that inherits from ErrorMail, you can over-ride some or all of its methods, such as should_send(), format_subject(), format_body() and send().

class ErrorMail(object):

    # pep8.py borks on a inline signature separator and
    # says "trailing whitespace" ;)
    EMAIL_SIGNATURE_SEP = "-- "

    #: Format string used to generate error email subjects.
    subject = """\
        [celery@%(hostname)s] Error: Task %(name)s (%(id)s): %(exc)s
    """

    #: Format string used to generate error email content.
    body = """
Task %%(name)s with id %%(id)s raised exception:\n%%(exc)r


Task was called with args: %%(args)s kwargs: %%(kwargs)s.

The contents of the full traceback was:

%%(traceback)s

%(EMAIL_SIGNATURE_SEP)s
Just to let you know,
celeryd at %%(hostname)s.
""" % {"EMAIL_SIGNATURE_SEP": EMAIL_SIGNATURE_SEP}

    error_whitelist = None

    def __init__(self, task, **kwargs):
        #subject=None, body=None, error_whitelist=None
        self.task = task
        self.email_subject = kwargs.get("subject", self.subject)
        self.email_body = kwargs.get("body", self.body)
        self.error_whitelist = getattr(task, "error_whitelist")

    def should_send(self, context, exc):
        allow_classes = tuple(map(get_symbol_by_name,  self.error_whitelist))
        return not self.error_whitelist or isinstance(exc, allow_classes)

    def format_subject(self, context):
        return self.subject.strip() % context

    def format_body(self, context):
        return self.body.strip() % context

    def send(self, context, exc, fail_silently=True):
        if self.should_send(context, exc):
            self.task.app.mail_admins(self.format_subject(context),
                                      self.format_body(context),
                                      fail_silently=fail_silently)

Here is one example that formats the subject of the email with just the task name, and doesn't send the email at all for a certain set of exceptions.

class NaiveAuthenticateServer(Task):
    ErrorMail = MyErrorMail
    ...

class MyErrorMail(ErrorMail):

    def format_subject(self, context):
        # options: hostname, id, name, exc, traceback, args, kwargs
        return "[celery] %(name)s" % context

    def should_send(self, context, exc):
        return not isinstance(exc, (ZeroDivisionError, TypeError))