Service group

Besides a few options affecting Dispatcher operation as a whole, or set directly at the  level to establish defaults for Dispatcher services lacking their own specific settings,  the primary way that Dispatcher options are set is within named   groups, to define specific Dispatcher services. Each such named service has associated ports (established via the   and/or    options); the Dispatcher listens for TCP connections on those ports, and  then hands off the connections to Worker Processes for the named service, where the Worker Process will then execute the   specified for that service.

For instance, at its most basic, in principle the SMTP service could be defined as: msconfig&#x3e; set dispatcher.service:SMTP.tcp_ports 25 msconfig# set dispatcher.service:SMTP.image IMTA_BIN:tcp_smtp_server msconfig# set dispatcher.service:SMTP.enable 1 More typically, however, additional options, such as a   and perhaps   as well as  various options tuning performance would be set also; while since the    Dispatcher    option defaults to , and as of MS 7.0.5 the named   service defaults to the    shown, in reality  neither of those options needs to be explicitly set.

Within a named Dispatcher service group, besides the port   and/or  ) and   option settings establishing the correspondence between port(s) and service, many other Dispatcher option  settings are available to specify and further control operation of that service: thresholds at which to create new or additional server processes, age at which to expire "old" server processes, etc.

Thus in particular note that in MTA terminology and operation, a Dispatcher service such as the SMTP service encompasses potentially multiple  (transient) SMTP server processes: the SMTP server processes come and go, created and expired as needed by the Dispatcher, within the parameters established in the Dispatcher&#x27;s SMTP service definition.

Note that special symbolic names known to the MTA -- such as   and   -- are supported (and convenient) for values of service group options.

See also:
 * tcp_ports Option
 * ssl_ports Option
 * Dispatcher operation
 * image Option
 * enable Option
 * logfilename Option
 * parameter Option
 * Special symbolic names
 * Dispatcher options