Failure notifications

Feed Control can email you a daily summary of everything that failed: webhook, Slack and Discord deliveries, feed fetches, full-text extractions and uploads. This page explains how to turn the email on, what's in it, and what Feed Control does on its own when something goes wrong.

Daily failure summary email#

Turning it on or off#

The email is off until you turn it on.

1. Click Event Logs in the sidebar.
2. Find the Daily Failure Notifications card, below the statistics.
3. Click the switch. The change is saved straight away.

To stop the emails, turn the same switch off. The email goes to your account's email address; see Profile, password and two-factor to change it.

Note: The email's footer says you can turn it off in your Feed Control settings. The switch is on the Event Logs screen.

When it's sent#

Feed Control checks once a day, shortly after midnight UTC, and only sends an email if something failed:

• It covers events that failed since the last summary you were sent. If you haven't had one before, it covers the last 24 hours.
• An event counts once it's Failed, meaning it has used up its automatic retries. An event that's still Pending while it waits for a retry isn't included yet. Because retries can take a few hours, a failure can show up in the next day's email rather than today's.
• Tests sent with Send test webhook are never included.
• If nothing failed, no email is sent.

What's in it#

The subject line gives the number of failures, for example Feed Control: 3 failed events in the last 24 hours. The email contains:

• Summary by Type: how many events of each type failed (Webhook, Slack, Discord, Fetch, Extract or Upload).
• Recent Failed Events: up to 20 failures, newest first, each with its type, the feed it belongs to, the start of the error message and how long ago the event was created. If there are more, the email says how many more there are.
• View All Failed Events: a button that opens Event Logs filtered to failed events, where you can see the details of each one and retry it.

The email is a starting point: open each failed event in Event logs to see why it failed, then fix the cause and retry it. Troubleshooting covers the most common causes.

Note: The daily failure summary is separate from a feed's email alerts, which tell you about new items. See Email alerts.

What Feed Control does automatically#

Retries failed events#

Failed webhook, Slack and Discord deliveries, extractions and uploads are retried automatically, up to 3 attempts in all, about an hour and then about two hours apart. Feed fetches aren't retried: the feed is checked again at its next scheduled time. See Automatic retries.

Keeps checking feeds that fail#

Feed Control doesn't switch a feed off because its source keeps failing. It keeps checking the feed on schedule. If a source has gone for good, turn off the feed's Active setting on its Source tab, or delete the feed. See Source settings.

Leaves failed extractions out of your generated feeds#

When full-text extraction for an item fails after its retries, the item's status in the Feed Items tab shows failed. Items that aren't fully processed are left out of the feed's generated RSS and JSON, its bundles and its widgets. Retry the extraction from Event logs, or select the item on the Feed Items tab and choose Actions > Re-fetch content. See Full-text extraction.

Stops updating feeds over your plan's limit#

If your account has more feeds than your plan allows, for example after moving to a smaller plan, the feeds you added first keep updating, up to the limit. The others stop updating. They're highlighted in red in the Feeds list, and their page shows:

Feed disabled. You have exceeded the plan limit for the number of feeds.

Nothing is deleted. Delete feeds you no longer need, or upgrade, and the rest start updating again. See Plans and limits.

When a plan or trial ends, none of the account's feeds are updated until you subscribe. See Billing and plan changes.

Pauses features your plan doesn't include#

On the Basic plan, Google News feeds and feeds that use the headless browser aren't updated. Their page shows Updates paused — Google News feeds require a Plus or Business plan or Updates paused — headless browser fetching requires a Plus or Business plan. For a headless browser feed, turn off Use headless browser on the Full text tab to resume updates.