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Three ways to write a rule that can never be true

Each of these loads without complaint, matches nothing, and costs an afternoon.
== is a numeric operator. vendor1:from:==:MyBrand does not quietly fail to match — it fails to parse, which fails the whole reload and leaves the previous table in service. Use equals for text.
matches is a regular expression and it is anchored, because the gateway calls Pattern.matches rather than find. ^61.* matches a whole destination; a bare 61 matches only the two-character string 61.startsWith compares literal text. A regular expression handed to it asks whether a destination literally begins with the characters ^(?:\+61 — nothing does, so the rule stores, loads, displays and never fires. The control panel warns about this; a hand-edited file does not.
An unset field matches no positive operator. product:equals:premium does not match a message carrying no product at all, and neither does product:startsWith:prem. Only isNull does.The reverse trips people the other way: product:!equals:premium does fire for a message with no product, because negation inverts the failed match.

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The grammar

Rules are evaluated top to bottom within a table and the first match wins. Target is a worker instance (vendor1, smppserver.smpp), a group, or another table to chain into (MESSAGE).
Routing lists each table with its rules in order. The editor validates the operator against the field before saving, refuses a numeric operator on a text field, and warns about a regular expression written into a literal operator.
The catch-all goes at the end. Above other rules it makes every rule below it unreachable, and nothing warns you in the file — they parse fine, they simply never run. The panel reports it; the gateway records it as unreachable-rules on /ops/health and carries on.

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Operators

Any operator can be negated with a leading !. The four text comparisons are lexicographical, not numeric — greaterThan on a phone number compares strings.

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Who sent it

product is how one customer selects routing per session: the same credential binding with system_type=premium and system_type=bulk produces two sessions that route differently. See Concepts. Message types for type rules: 0 text, 10 binary, 11 UCS-2, 14 flash, 17 push, 18 delivery receipt.

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Conditions on the target, not the message

Prefixing a field with target. reads a field of the destination worker instead, which is how a rule steers around a vendor that is backing up:
There are exactly four — queueSize, sentPendingRate, sentDeliveredRate, sentFailRate — matched case-insensitively, and an unrecognised one is refused at parse time with the four listed.
marginPercentage and marginStatus are message fields, so drop the target. prefix and they resolve. Be aware of what they hold: both are set on the submit response, after the message has gone, so a routing condition on either reads NOT_CALCULATED on every first attempt.

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Copy and continue

A + on the target copies the message to that target and carries on scanning, rather than routing and stopping. In the database it is the copied column.

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Vendor groups

A rule may target a group instead of one vendor. The group picks a member, skipping any that is suspended or not accepting — that skip is the failover a single-target rule cannot do.
Group blocks must come before the first [table] header. Inside a table block a member line matches nothing and is dropped silently, so the group ends up with fewer members than it reads as having — or none.A weight is read only by weighted. Setting one on the other two changes nothing, and the gateway says so at WARN rather than letting you believe a split is happening.
One message, one debit, one destination. A group always selects exactly one member, and +copied on a group rule still copies to one member — fanning out would be N sends against a single charge.If every member is down the rule sends nothing, logs cause=group-all-dead naming everyone it tried, and the scan continues to the next rule, which is what keeps a fallback rule written below a group rule reachable.
Full grammar reference: routingTable.conf.