How can I detect when an Exception's been thrown globally in Java?

You probobly don't want to mail on any exception. There are lots of code in the JDK that actaully depend on exceptions to work normally. What I presume you are more inerested in are uncaught exceptions. If you are catching the exceptions you should handle notifications there.

In a desktop app there are two places to worry about this, in the event-dispatch-thread (EDT) and outside of the EDT. Globaly you can register a class implementing java.util.Thread.UncaughtExceptionHandler and register it via java.util.Thread.setDefaultUncaughtExceptionHandler. This will get called if an exception winds down to the bottom of the stack and the thread hasn't had a handler set on the current thread instance on the thread or the ThreadGroup.

The EDT has a different hook for handling exceptions. A system property 'sun.awt.exception.handler' needs to be registerd with the Fully Qualified Class Name of a class with a zero argument constructor. This class needs an instance method handle(Throwable) that does your work. The return type doesn't matter, and since a new instance is created every time, don't count on keeping state.

So if you don't care what thread the exception occurred in a sample may look like this:

class ExceptionHandler implements Thread.UncaughtExceptionHandler {
  public void uncaughtException(Thread t, Throwable e) {
    handle(e);
  }

  public void handle(Throwable throwable) {
    try {
      // insert your e-mail code here
    } catch (Throwable t) {
      // don't let the exception get thrown out, will cause infinite looping!
    }
  }

  public static void registerExceptionHandler() {
    Thread.setDefaultUncaughtExceptionHandler(new ExceptionHandler());
    System.setProperty("sun.awt.exception.handler", ExceptionHandler.class.getName());
  }
}

Add this class into some random package, and then call the registerExceptionHandler method and you should be ready to go.

The new debugging hooks in Java 1.5 let you do this. It enables e.g. "break on any exception" in debuggers.

Here's the specific Javadoc you need.

Check out Thread.UncaughtExceptionHandler. You can set it per thread or a default one for the entire VM.

This would at least help you catch the ones you miss.