Hello,
sending out emails via rules on updates can be quite tricky, since even a read can change a property / aspect, albeit a technical one, of a node. E.g. if you are the first one to look at the details of a document, you will trigger an operation that generates the thumbnail / preview, which in turn updates the original document with the necessary aspect (and potentially property). Last I checked you couldn't reliably filter out unwanted changes as triggers for rules. When we implement something like this, we usually write up a policy that has access to the actual change data to determine if we should trigger an email, e.g. only consider the core business metadata and ignore all technical Alfresco metadata changes.
Regarding your exception stack trace: I suppose this has nothing to do with your email rule issue, but may be some other error. Can you adjust the Log4J settings to find out which web script this actually relates to?
Regards
Axel