I don't think RabbitMQ has a retry count. It has a retry flag, which tells you if this is the first time a message has gone out for delivery, or an attempt at a redelivery. You can use that to requeue after the first failure, but to reject (and send to a dead-letter queue) after the second. But you can't do anything more than that without manually managing a count.

At least, that's the conclusion i came to when i looked at redelivery for an application i work on that uses RabbitMQ. Please do correct me if i'm wrong.