# How it works

This section is for those who want to dig in a litle more on what the internal processes look like. This page will grow as we hear more questions on how the code functions and the answers do not really belong in any other section of the docs.

## What is the actual message flow?

If we were watching a message flow through KumoMTA in "[Bullet-Time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_time)", the flow would look like this:

* A message to a recipient hits the esmtp listener, which only passes if it complies with the access rules in the listener
* The message is passed to `smtp_server_message_received`, where you can modify the message and its meta data
* _After_ it returns, we resolve the scheduled queue name by:
 *  Reading msg:get_meta('queue') and using that if it is set
 *  Reading the recipient.domain, msg:get_meta('tenant'), msg:get_meta('campaign') and computing the queue name
* If we haven't already created that scheduled queue, trigger `get_queue_config` to configure it
* If/when the message is eligible for delivery, call `get_egress_pool` + `get_egress_source` to determine the list of sources, then pick one so that we can determine the path that it will take.
* If we haven't already created a ready queue for that path, `get_egress_path_config` is called and used to create it

The flow above was specificially for SMTP messages, but HTTP injected messages follow a similar process.

This flow is important to understand because this is where you can do a great deal of manipulation of the message processing.  For instance, you can alter the path for a specific message by changing the tenant or queue variables.  

```Lua
   msg:set_meta('queue',null)  -- send all new messages to dev/null
```
or 
```Lua
  if message:sender().email == 'test@mydomain.org' then
    msg:set_meta('queue','my_remote_smarthost.com')  -- route all messages from 'test@mydomain.org' to a remote smarthost relay
  end
```
or
 
You could potentially augment the campaign name for all messages based on the sender domain for easier reporting
```Lua
 local mycampaign = msg:get_meta('campaign')
 local mydomain = message:sender().domain
 local mycampaign_new = mycampaign .. " - " .. mydomain
 msg:set_meta('campaign',mycampaign_new) 
```

With Lua, and access to the message part variables, you can do almost anything.