1) Do not sent email about anything except malformed queries! Let the
   mysqld watchdog send mail when it notices (runs every minute).

2) Try much much harder to not fail when the server goes away, wait
   longer for it to come back so the query can be issued. The idea being
   to avoid daemons dying off when there is a transient mysqld failure.

There is a certain amount of hope and prayer here, mysqld documentation
says very little about what happens to a query when you get an error
back. Some are obvious (mysqld is gone, cannot connect) but others are
murky (query interrupted). Clearly any read query can be issued again,
but updates maybe not. We have been retrying all queries for a long time
now (years) hard to say if its ever caused a problem. Good thing we are
not a bank, our customers might be very wealthy or totally broke.