Log4j2 SMTPAppender not sending email

My question is similar to these two:

• Log4j2: SMTPAppender does not send mails with error or fatal level
• How to send email notifications with slf4j / log4j2?

but I am not able to send SMTPs at all, and I do not want to put the <appender-ref ref="SMTPAppender" /> inside the root logger. If i did, i would receive emails from every logger. So the SMTPAppender is able to send SMTPs but I just want the notificationLogger to be the only logger sending emails.

Here is my log4j2.xml file:

    <loggers>
        <logger name="notificationLogger" level="fatal" additivity="false">
            <appender-ref ref="SMTPAppender" /> 
            <appender-ref ref="stdout" />
        </logger>
        <logger name="com.prod" level="INFO">
            <appender-ref ref="RollingFile"/>
        </logger>
        <root level="INFO">
            <appender-ref ref="stdout"/>
        </root>
    </loggers>

What do i do in order to have the notificationLogger be the only logger sending SMTPs?

I had to update my maven dependencies to fix a known bug.

  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.logging.log4j</groupId>
    <artifactId>log4j-api</artifactId>
    <version>2.0-beta9</version>
  </dependency>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.logging.log4j</groupId>
    <artifactId>log4j-core</artifactId>
    <version>2.0-beta9</version>
  </dependency>