I have setup the logging module for my new python script.  I have two handlers, one sending stuff to a file, and one for email alerts.  The SMTPHandler is setup to mail anything at the ERROR level or above.
Everything works great, unless the SMTP connection fails.  If the SMTP server does not respond or authentication fails (it requires SMTP auth), then the whole script dies.
I am fairly new to python, so I am trying to figure out how to capture the exception that the SMTPHandler is raising so that any problems sending the log message via email won't bring down my entire script.  Since I am also writing errors to a log file, if the SMTP alert fails, I just want to keep going, not halt anything.
If I need a "try:" statement, would it go around the logging.handlers.SMTPHandler setup, or around the individual calls to my_logger.error()?
You probably need to do both. To figure this out, I suggest to install a local mail server and use that. This way, you can shut it down while your script runs and note down the error message.
To keep the code maintainable, you should extends SMTPHandler in such a way that you can handle the exceptions in a single place (instead of wrapping every logger call with try-except).
Python logging SMTPHandler - handling offline SMTP server