With its 3.20 GHz Intel Xeon processor, 2Gb memory, two 73GB SCSI drives configured as RAID-1, redundant power supplies, hardened Linux kernel and four Gigabit Ethernet ports, the Sendmail Sentrion GP is aimed firmly at the enterprise market.
Set-up was uncomplicated, with the printed guide providing a simple ten-step configuration process that had the system up and running within minutes. The browser-based interface gave access to all the monitoring and configuration pages, and was easy to navigate. There are two sets of graphical status displays, one for the system and one for the mail processing software.
Administrators can be set up with different access levels so that functions can be split, perhaps separating those responsible for monitoring traffic from those responsible for configuration.
The Sentrion offers Cloudmark’s anti-spam technology as well as its own policy-based system, and has a Directory Harvest Attack protection feature, although it only operates when connected to an LDAP server. LDAP is also required for SMTP authentication, which may restrict the device’s use in some systems.
Many features are controlled by policies – flow control, directory harvest attack and content filtering are all controlled in this way – and some predefined policies can be enabled or disabled as desired.
New policies are created simply by selecting options from drop-down lists. Additional features, such as address lists, word lists and quarantine policies can be used to produce a detailed rule set to handle complex situations.
As well as the anti-spam software settings already operating, and any third party blacklist servers that might have been configured, mail can be blocked by domain, sender or mail host.
Setting up links to RBL servers such as Spamhaus is simple, while report options are limited, but cover the essentials. There are pre-configured reports for daily and weekly traffic details and user activity. The traffic reports are displayed on the screen in the same sort of graphical layout as that used for the current system activity display.
