Sendmail Sentrion MP ships in either a virtual appliance edition (MPV) or as a 1U/2U hardware appliance configuration. It contains several security services that are unlocked via licence modules.
Setting up the Sentrion MP was fairly straightforward; however, it does require a USB keyboard and has no other setup option.
Once the solution is enabled, it is very easy to see why it is so powerful. While the web-based UI is not the most user-friendly on the market, there is a wealth of information, from dashboards to configuration options. It may take a minute or two to become acclimatised on how to start configuring important options such as policy enforcement.
Sentrion MP has one of the most impressive feature-sets for both email security and content management. It has a myriad of processing options in terms of how it handles inbound and outbound messages, and the various policy elements are applied using conditions and conditional logic.
With the full licensing that we tested, the appliance had tremendous capabilities in anti-spam, anti-virus, policy management, content filtering and encryption. Encryption support includes S/MIME, STARTTLS and Voltage Identity Based Encryption, which is a unique way of applying encryption rules to particular messages.
The number of features and the administrative control over message processing are impressive and definitely aimed at larger organisations. Sendmail also offers industry-specific policy templates, which are pre-populated with common policy items to protect against compliance and data leakage.
If we had complaints about the ease of use, it would be the UI, as well as the fact that several changes to the system have to be saved, committed and deployed - and not necessarily in that order.
Documentation on the appliance and within the Sendmail website is excellent.
Different support levels are available at various pricing tiers. These vary greatly, depending on whether or not a hardware appliance is used and what licensing features are unlocked. For the IBE encryption module that we tested, users will have to add on an extra fee per user.