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Queue: retrying failed sends (Pro)

WirdPro synchronisiertversion. …This feature is part of the Pro version of Mail Log. What the Free version does is covered under Free version and Pro version.

When sending an e-mail fails, the Free version leaves it there until somebody re-sends it by hand. The Pro version does that for you: it puts the message in a queue and tries again by itself.

The queue with three waiting messages, showing status, attempt counter, next attempt and the last message from the mail server

How often and how quickly

The wait doubles with every attempt. At the default of 15 minutes that is 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour and 2 hours — four attempts spread over three and a half hours. That covers the vast majority of outages without pressing a server that is already struggling.

Not every failure is worth repeating

Mail Log tells apart what the mail server reported:

Kind of failureWhat happens Server unreachable, timeout, temporary rejection Retried. Authentication rejected Retried, and the failure is noted in the task log — a wrong password does not fix itself. Address does not exist, message rejected for good Not retried. The message is marked as given up.

That is not a detail: an address that does not exist will not start existing. Writing to it four times anyway only costs time and, over the long run, damages your domain's standing with recipients.

Switching it on

    In the Options, open the Queue tab and switch on Retry automatically. In the Scheduler, create the task Mail Log: work through the queue. Every 5 to 15 minutes is a sensible interval.

    Without the task nothing happens. The queue fills up but is never worked through. If you see waiting messages and nothing moves, that is almost always the reason.

    The screen

    Under Mail Log → Queue you see what is pending: status, subject, how many attempts have been made, when the next one is due, and what the mail server last reported. The subject links to the original log entry.

    StatusMeaning WaitingThe next attempt is still to come. SendingA run is working on it right now. DeliveredA retry succeeded. Given upAll attempts are used up, or the failure was permanent. CancelledStopped by hand.

    Queue again gives a message that was given up another chance — for instance after you have fixed the cause. Cancel stops a waiting message without deleting it.

    Retrying only certain messages

    With no rules, every failed message is queued. With rules you narrow that down — say order confirmations but not contact form forwards. The rules work like the log and display rules: pick a field, enter a text, and decide whether one or all of the rules must match.

    Limits

      A message is re-sent at most 20 times in total — counted across every route, including the button in the detail view. After that Mail Log refuses further attempts. This limit is what stops a permanently undeliverable recipient from being written to for ever. If the original log entry has been deleted — by the cleanup task, for instance — the message can no longer be rebuilt. The job is then given up. Only what was logged can be retried. If logging of the message body is switched off, or the mail was classified as sensitive, the content is not available.

      Deutsche Fassung

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