Sendmail Sentrion MP 4.0

The Sendmail Sentrion MP solution ships in either a virtual appliance edition (MPV) or as a 1U/2U hardware appliance configuration. Sentrion MP is both an email security and email content management solution and contains several security services, which are unlocked via license modules. 

Setting up the device was fairly straightforward; however, it does require a USB keyboard and has no other setup option. Once the solution is enabled, it's very easy to see why the Sentrion solution is so powerful. While the web GUI isn't the most user friendly on the market, there is a wealth of information from dashboards to granular configuration options. It may take a minute or two to become acclimated to how to start configuring important options, such as policy enforcement.

Overall the tool has an impressive feature set for both email security and content management. It has myriad 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 with regard to anti-spam, anti-virus, policy management, content filtering and encryption. Encryption support includes S/MIME, STARTTLS and Voltage Identity-Based Encryption (IBE), which is a unique way of applying encryption rules to particular messages. 

The number of features and administrative control over message processing is very impressive. It is definitely aimed at larger organizations with subject matter experts who need flexible control over routing, networking and additional aspects of the email security architecture. Sendmail also offers industry-specific policy templates included in the price, which are pre-populated with common policy items to protect against compliance and data leakage. If we had one complaint about the ease of use, it would be the overall 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. Support levels include Silver, Gold and Platinum contracts with respective SLA agreements and are available at various pricing tiers. It's worth noting that Sendmail's pricing tiers 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 may expect to add $25 per user on average.