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PMTA knowledge base›Accounting record§ 12.2

Parsed bounce from outside

rb
A bounce report that arrived as an email

A bounce report email arrived at the configured processor and was parsed.

The record type letter is rb. It comes first in the line, and that is how the parser tells one type from another.

It differs from an ordinary bounce in origin: there the receiver refused during the conversation, here it sent a report later as a separate email.

Such bounces arrive with a delay of hours or days — and so they land in the reports for the day they arrived, not the day the message was sent.

The main trap is counting things from the wrong records. One record type answers one question, and a substitution gives a plausible wrong number: attempts instead of messages, queues instead of recipients, the day a report was received instead of the day of sending.
What the Hub does. There are no report processors in the configuration, so such records do not appear. Reports that arrive as emails are accepted at role addresses and discarded.
Recommended values

Which question this record answers:

Question Is it this record
a bounce report that arrived as an email yes
how many messages in total only together with the other types
why it happened look at the reply text, not at the record type

Record types are enabled and disabled in the accounting block. A disabled type does not disappear from a report — it disappears from the data, and the absence of events becomes indistinguishable from there genuinely being none.

The separation of questions is ours. From the manual here are the condition under which the record appears and its letter.
Example configuration
# the first letter of the line is the record type
rb,2019-02-08 21:53:41+0000,...
Parsing accounting starts with this letter: all the other columns make sense only in combination with it.
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

2 relations

Does not work without

Two inbound report processors and what to do with themThe bounce processor parses the incoming email and creates this record. § 12.2.6

Works together with

Permanently bouncedThe same outcome, but learned from a report email rather than from the conversation with the receiver. § 12.2.6

Referenced from

Delivery notificationA neighboring type: there the report is about a failure, here about everything else. § 12.2.6Parsing bounces that arrive as messagesThe accounting record in which the result is visible. § 13.6

How to check on the node
How many records of each type arrived:
grep -c "^rb," /var/log/pmta/acct-*.csv
cut -d, -f1 /var/log/pmta/acct-*.csv | sort | uniq -c
Zero while sending is going on means one of two things: there are no events of this kind, or the record type is disabled in the accounting block. The second command helps tell them apart — it prints a summary across all types.
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What else to read

3 articles

◇The bounce category in accounting — configurable, not vendor-fixedThe bounceCat string in every accounting record comes from a pattern list that can be extended with your own rules and your own category names.◇Parsing bounces that arrive as messagesBounce reports that arrive as messages are parsed by a separate processor — and it runs before the complaint processor.◇Two inbound report processors and what to do with themBounces by message and complaints are parsed by two identically structured blocks; each has its own address list and its own pair of decisions about the message’s fate.

In the Hub
Cost of a mistake
safe: a wrong value breaks nothing
Scenarios
Bounce classification · Address suppression