Your settings

What this screen is for

Some of how MailGuardHQ behaves is yours to choose: how many rows a request hands back by default, how long a new API token lasts, how long a password confirmation counts for. Settings is where you choose them, and each one applies to your whole organisation rather than to you personally.

Nothing here is a hidden switch. Every value shows what it does before you touch it, because a number you cannot interpret is one you either set wrongly or never touch at all - and both of those are worse than not offering it.

Reading a setting before you change it

Everything you need is beside the field. There is no separate reference to go and find, because a reference is somewhere you go afterwards.

• The description says what the setting actually controls, in plain words rather than in the name of the code that reads it.
• Lower means and Higher means say what each direction COSTS you. A shorter token lifetime means replacing tokens more often; a longer one means a leaked token keeps working for longer. Neither is simply better.
• Allowed is the range you can save inside right now - already narrowed by the platform bound below, so it is the real range rather than one you would be refused from.
• Ships as is the value it starts at, and what Reset puts it back to following.

The platform bound, and why your range can move

Most of these settings are limited by a MailGuardHQ platform value. Where one is, the row says so: MailGuardHQ currently allows at most…, or currently requires at least…. You tune inside that window; you cannot step outside it.

That bound belongs to the platform, not to you, so it can move - and if it does, what applies to your organisation moves with it. That is deliberate rather than a gap: it is how a platform-wide limit takes effect without anybody having to edit every account.

If a value you saved earlier is now outside the window, your value is not thrown away. The row tells you what you have stored, what the platform currently allows, and which of the two is in force today. Should the bound widen again, your stored value applies once more. A setting that silently reverted, with nothing on screen to say so, would look like the product forgetting what you asked for.

Some rows cannot be changed here at all and say so. Those are set by MailGuardHQ; they are shown rather than hidden, because a value that governs your account is one you are entitled to read even where you may not edit it.

Saving, and what happens if a value will not fit

The value is checked twice. This page refuses anything outside the window before it is sent, which saves you a round trip that could only end in the same refusal; the API checks again when it writes, and that is the check that actually guards your data.

A refusal names which limit stopped it - the setting's own range, or the platform bound - because "outside the allowed range" is true and useless when there are two ranges in play.

Reset is not the same as typing today's default in yourself. It drops your organisation's own value so the setting follows the platform default again, including whenever that default later changes. Typing the number in pins you to today's.

What this screen does not cover