logback using external properties file not working correctly

Question

I think I hit a playframework - logback specific bug, perhaps not, any assistance would be great!

I' ve needed an email appender to send me emails when an error occures.
So I created a simple one with all the properties defined within:

<appender name="EMAIL" class="ch.qos.logback.classic.net.SMTPAppender">
    <smtpHost>myhost</smtpHost>
    <smtpPort>25</smtpPort>
    <STARTTLS>true</STARTTLS>
    <username>username</username>
    <password>pass</password>
    <to>to</to>
    <from>from</from>
    <subject>Error: %logger{20} - %m</subject>
    <layout class="ch.qos.logback.classic.PatternLayout">
        <pattern>%date %-5level %logger{35} - %message%n</pattern>
    </layout>
</appender>

This worked fine.
Then I wanted to refactor all of the properties cause obviously i don't want to commit passwords and stuff like that to the source control.
So i replaced all the properties by ${propname} and added this at the begining

<property file="conf/mail.properties"/>

now emails are not sent anymore.
I debugged and printed out the properties and saw that the problem has to do with quotes.
my to/from are email addresses, when I put them in my properties file I need to surround them with quotes otherwise i get an error like this:

Caused by: com.typesafe.config.ConfigException$Parse: /myconfdir../mail.properties: 19: Reserved character '@' is not allowed outside quotes

Also my password has a "+" symbol in it and if it's unquoted in the properties file i get the same error.
When debugging with these quoted values I see that the quote is included inside them.
So an email is trying to be sent to "a@b.com" and no a@b.com. Same for from field and for the password.
So obviously it doesn't work.

Any idea how to prevent this?

Answer 1

I have done the same task by this :

In logback.xml file, Add this :

property resource="filename.properties"

<username>${username}</username>
<password>${password}</password>
<to>${email1}</to>
<from>${from}</from>