You are right, the activity behavior was changed between 8.0 and 8.3 due to user requests. Depending on how crucial that email is to your business process, just recording a warning and moving on may not be acceptable. So now the activity reports a fatal error.

Like Jason said, you can use a Try-Catch activity to turn it back into a warning. If you choose to do that, you should be careful how you set up the Catch branch because it may end up hiding legitimate errors (for ex, if your mail server is moved or misconfigured and you're catching all errors, you may not notice that no emails go out). You can configure it to ignore some errors and still terminate on unexpected ones. You would also have to apply this solution to every email activity you have.

Ali's suggestion of using Task Error Handlers is better as it would apply to all workflows (present and future) and would allow you to customize the wait time per error.

WF8.3 and higher comes with an out-of-the-box task error handler for "operation timed out" errors connecting to the mail server. This is the most common issue with emails not being sent out. If you have a suggestion for more exceptions to be added, we can add them as defaults to future versions.

I’m not aware of any way to change the setting back to a warning, but you can bypass the error using the try-catch activity. The activity consists of two branches, a try branch and a catch branch. If there is no error the workflow continues as normal, but if an activity within the try branch fails, the workflow takes the catch branch and continues on. You can choose to put alternate activities within the catch branch, or you can simply leave the branch empty to tell workflow just to skip that step and keep on chugging.

If you would like to read more about the try-catch activity, you can check out the entry in our online help files.

We continue to have email issues, upwards to six or seven emails failing the TRY and the attachment (edoc) that was supposed to go to the email recipient goes into a holding folder (CATCH branch). I now have to check this folder every morning and right after lunch - we have so many emails not getting sent out with court documents.   I tried sending myself an email in the CATCH logic, but those emails fail as well.  I really do not think our email server is so busy that it cannot send these emails w/o these errors.

Is there a way, in the CATCH branch, to format a WF or LF error that will appear in the workflow "Messages" tab of the Search results, so I can truly identify the problem?  It seems to be getting worse and worse.