After lots of Google'ing I finially found this great CodeProject article that shows how to create a new custom Smtp Appender using the AppenderSkeleton abstract class as a base.
It's simple, and can be changed so that the From property is set dynamically at runtime. And it also shows how to pass a pattern in for the Subject property, so your Email Subject can contain the logged event level and other information.
e.g.
<subject type="HHR.log4net.Layout.PatternLayout, HHR.log4net">
<conversionPattern value="%date %level %exceptType at [%logger] on %property{log4net:HostName} by %username" />
</subject>