Content

Corpex Armourplate

Armourplate is a managed service with offices in the U.K. and Germany. Although the website claims to be "for U.K. business", the company says it is open to customers anywhere in the world. With the contact details and office hours limited to U.K. specifics, we feel the company (or its parent, Corpex) could be doing a lot more to draw attention to this.

The service's management interface is actually very good, but it took a moment for us to realize this. Compared to others, Armourplate's GUI is spartan, and navigation is clumsy. But this is because the layout is deliberately minimal, and the site makes no use of cookies or anything else to manage sessions.

The result is limited, but it also means you can run the interface from a PDA, smartphone or even a text browser if you have to, and still be able to get where you need to go.

Although the GUI is supposed to be encrypted, when we tried to replace the https with http in the URL for the interface, it happily allowed us to log in with a plaintext password.

The service comes with the barest minimum of documentation and no online help. The company walks new customers through the service, but if you appoint a new admin, he better be a quick study.

Armourplate includes the nice touch of a POP mailbox service.

Support is limited to office hours (GMT), too – although customers can buy extended support contracts – which really limits the company's prospective customer base. Even if they are targeting the U.K.-based market, we expect to see 24x7 support in modern managed service whatever their market.

Spam filtering was acceptable, but the quarantine is in keeping with the minimalist theme, although we definitely liked the way it strips images and other components out of HTML.

We had no facility to tune the junk thresholds (although you can contact support to do so). Many other configuration details cannot be changed either.

We like the interface, but overall the Armourplate service feels unfinished, more like a web interface to Unix email spam filter than a real managed service. However, that is not a reflection on its feature set, which is perfectly acceptable.

Product title
Corpex Armourplate
Product info
Name: Corpex Armourplate (Email services group test) Description: Price: $50 per user per year for 10 users.
Strength
Clean interface once you get used to it.
Weakness
No documentation, limited support.
Verdict
Needs a lot of work to compete with more polished providers.

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