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kumomta/docs/reference/connectionmeta.md
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Wez Furlong b8310da8be docs: add warning about logging headers
TL;DR: you can easily halve your system performance by logging headers
vs. logging meta.

This is one of those things that is easy to overlook or forget,
but: whenever you need to operate on the message data, rather
than its metadata, the aggregate cost is high.

In this case, we were recently troubleshooting a system where
the CPU was bogged down and we traced it to the logging configuration: a
number of message headers were being logged in a configuration that
made heavy use of throttles and limits in its traffic shaping, and
thus had a large number of Delayed and TransientFailure events being
written to the logs.

When logging headers, each one of those events requires loading
the message from the spool and parsing out the headers.  When the
average message size is ~100KB this imposes a notable overhead
on the CPU and IO utilization of the system.

What we recommend instead of logging headers directly is capturing
the information that you want to log into the message metadata
at the time that the message is received.

The message meta is usually already loaded, but is also typically
much smaller and easier to decode than the full message content
in the cases where it is not loaded.

As a result, it is much cheaper to log meta than to log headers.

This commit adds some warnings and cross links to help folks
be aware of this, and to generally navigate related meta and logging
topics more easily via tags.
2025-04-25 05:52:44 -07:00

60 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown

---
tags:
- meta
---
# Connection Metadata Object
{{since('2023.08.22-4d895015')}}
This object represents a collection of metadata keys and values that
are associated with an established incoming SMTP connection.
KumoMTA populates a small number of predefined fields (see below), and allows
your policy scripts the ability to read those values as well as write (and
read!) additional values as needed by the local policy. For instance, you may
decide to compute a value after EHLO has been processed by
[smtp_server_ehlo](events/smtp_server_ehlo.md) and access that value in a
later SMTP event handler.
Prior to calling [smtp_server_message_received](events/smtp_server_message_received.md),
KumoMTA will copy the values from the connection metadata and use those to populate
the [message](message/index.md) metadata.
The `get_meta` and `set_meta` methods shown below are used to read and write
metadata values.
## Predefined Connection Metadata Values
The following values are predefined by KumoMTA:
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|Scope|Name|Purpose|Since|
|----|----|-------|-----|
|Connection|`reception_protocol`|indicates the reception protocol, such as `ESMTP`|{{since('2023.08.22-4d895015', inline=True)}}|
|Connection|`received_via`|indicates the IP:port of the KumoMTA listener that is handling this session|{{since('2023.08.22-4d895015', inline=True)}}|
|Connection|`received_from`|indicates the IP:port of the sending or peer machine in this session|{{since('2023.08.22-4d895015', inline=True)}}|
|Connection|`hostname`|A copy of the effective value of the hostname set by [kumo.start_esmtp_listener](kumo/start_esmtp_listener/hostname.md)|{{since('2023.11.28-b5252a41', inline=True)}}|
|Connection|`authn_id`|the authentication id if the message was received via authenticated SMTP||
|Connection|`authz_id`|the authorization id if the message was received via authenticated SMTP||
!!! Note
Additional metadata is available at the Message scope, for a full list of all available metadata, see the [Predefined Metadata](./metadata.md) page.
## Available Methods
### `conn_meta:get_meta(name)`
Returns the value associated with *name*, or `nil` if no such value has been defined.
Values may be predefined by KumoMTA or may be set by policy scripts using `conn_meta:set_meta()`.
### `conn_meta:set_meta(name, value)`
Sets the value associated with *name* to *value*. Value must be serializable as JSON; it can be simple
strings or numbers, but may also be an array or object value.