Knowledge base
The cost of delivery in attempts
The number of retries before this event.
It is not written by default — the field has to be named in record-fields. The field set is defined in the accounting block, and fields are worth adding deliberately: there are as many delivery records as delivered recipients, and every extra column is multiplied by that volume.
A receiver to which every message gets through on the third attempt costs us three times more than the delivery counter shows.
The main trap is expecting the field from the star. The star gives only the default fields, and this field is not among them: until it is named in record-fields, the file has no such column at all.
What the Hub does. The event normalizer does not read it, but the Hub names the field in record-fields explicitly: the number of retries is counted by “Accounting stats” from the accounting file on the node.
Recommended values
Where the field exists and whether the star includes it:
| Record type | In the star |
|---|---|
| d — delivery | no |
| b — bounce | no |
| t — temporary failure | no |
In a shared file an empty value comes in two kinds: the line has no data — or the field is not selected for its record type.
The record types with this field and the default set markers come from the manual (§ 12.2.1, § 12.2.2, § 12.2.3); a list without the star replaces the set — § 3.3.11.12. The table is ours.
Example configuration
<acct-file /var/log/pmta/acct.csv> record-fields d *, numRetries</acct-file>
The star gives the default fields, and numRetries is added to them; for other record types the line is repeated with its own letter.
yellow — — directive names, blue — blocks. They are highlighted the same way in the text of the card.
Compatibility
PowerMTA 6.0
described in the manual of this version · platform: any
The vendor does not state the first version for every directive — there is no note here. The name also appears in the 5.0 edition of the manual.
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Related entries
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How to check on the node
Check whether the column is in the latest accounting file:
head -1 "$(ls -t /var/log/pmta/acct-*.csv | head -1)" | tr -d '\r' | tr ',' '\n' | grep -n '^numRetries$'
The line number in the output is the column number in the file; empty means the field is not selected for any record type in this file.
In the Hub
- Cost of a mistake
- safe: a wrong value breaks nothing