A lot of times when a server responds with an error code, it also returns a response message - eXist is a perfect example.  I have my custom sitemap components catching these error messages, which allows me to display a more helpful message than "Bad response from server", or whatnot.  However, the standard File Generator doesn't catch these sorts of things.  Would there be any way to get at these messages?  Perhaps a node in the notifying generator with the server's response, so that a handle-errors pipeline could use it?
 
Chris Marasti-Georg