Handling errors in email escalations

We have several processes that use escalations to send emails. In general, these are notification emails - tell a manager that there's been no activity for one hour, for example.

When sending mail fails (such as if the mail server is down), the escalation code throws an exception. This halts the process. We want the process to continue even if the email escalation fails.

We would prefer to have the notification be asynchronous as well, so that the main process is not delayed.

My initial attempt was to create a Mailer process to handle sending the email. It could be called asynchronously with from/to/subject/body data. The problem is, how do you call it from an escalation? There you have an EscalationActionContext, but you need an IPCEventContext.

Another option is to wrap email escalations in a try..catch block, but this is subject to timeout delays and does not provide traceability.

If anyone has suggestions on this problem, please let me know. Thanks!