Knowledge base
Separates waiting in the queue from waiting at the receiver
The timestamp of the first delivery attempt. It is enabled with a separate node directive.
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.
Three timestamps together — queuing, first attempt, logging — split the delay into two parts: how long the message waited for us and how long for the receiver.
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. In addition, the node must track the first attempt — track-time-first-attempt.
What the Hub does. It reads it — this is one of the fourteen fields the event normalizer parses: delivery time is calculated from it. The field is not in the default set, so the Hub names it in record-fields explicitly — both for the webhook and for the accounting file, where “Accounting stats” parses it as well.
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
track-time-first-attempt true <acct-file /var/log/pmta/acct.csv> record-fields d *, timeFirstAttempt</acct-file>
The star is the default fields, and timeFirstAttempt 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 "$(ls -t /var/log/pmta/acct-*.csv | head -1)" | tr -d '\r' | tr ',' '\n' | grep -n '^timeFirstAttempt$'
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