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PMTA knowledge base›Mechanism§ 15

The directive index

directive index
An inventory of documentation places, not of settings

The directive index is a list of 475 lines naming 477 documentation places: each line has a name, a label in parentheses and a link to a section.

The label is not always a block: sometimes it is a thematic group, for example SSL/TLS where the block is <domain>. The link is reliable: all 475 lead to exactly one heading. Two lines name a pair of directives under one heading at once.

The index is an inventory of documentation places, not of settings: a name may be documented in one place but work in several blocks. 48 names are documented in more than one place — include in five — which is why catalog entries carry in their identifier the block the directive is documented in.

The main trap is looking up a setting by name. One name in different blocks means different documentation places with different defaults: an index search without the block finds the wrong line.
What the Hub does. Nobody reads the index on a node; the whole catalog analysis was reconciled against it — the completeness of the 477 places was checked mechanically. One place where the manual shows a directive the index does not know turned up while reconciling the Hub templates: rewrite-list inside <source>.
Recommended values

What the index guarantees and what it does not:

Guarantees Does not guarantee
the name exists which blocks it can be written in
where it is documented that same-name directives are one setting
The number of lines and places, labels, links and 48 names in several places come from the manual’s index (§ 15) and the reconciliation of our analysis. The distinction is ours.
Example configuration
# one name — two places in the queue settings output
pmta show settings gmail.com/vmta1 | grep '^max-smtp-out '
The line appears twice — in the “Virtual MTA Settings” section and in “Queue Settings”: one name, two places.
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

Works together with

Four value types the whole config is written inA related mechanism: they work together. § 15

Applies to

The node's main configuration fileThe file the mechanism is concerned with. § 15

How to check on the node
See one name in two places on your own node:
pmta show settings gmail.com/vmta1 | grep '^max-smtp-out '
The first value is the sending address limit, the second the queue limit; these are different settings.
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What else to read

3 articles

◇Third-party components of the enginePowerMTA runs on five third-party libraries — PCRE, OpenSSL, ICU, gumbo-parser and prometheus-cpp; their behavior is determined by the engine build.◇Accept, route, deliverA message’s path inside the node: accept, decide where, deliver — and all the settings live between these three steps.◇What the node tells about itself and through which channelsSeven observation surfaces: the web monitor, the console in four formats, the log, accounting, accounting search, metrics and export to external analytics.

In the Hub
Cost of a mistake
safe: a wrong value breaks nothing
Scenarios
Configuration lifecycle · Troubleshoot deliverability