Setting a priority for a category limits which log messages are forwarded to the appenders. Thus, for both com.mycompany.package1 and com.mycompany.package2 only ERROR messages get logged. The root definition identifies the appenders to use for all log messages, thus all messages are sent to SMTP, CONSOLE and FILE. In addition, log messages for com.mycompany.package1 are sent a second time to CONSOLE - the messages were sent the first time to CONSOLE because all categories inherit from root. This point confused me the first time I ran into it also. View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4242282#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...