Buying and activating add-ons

SentryMail is open core: the core is open source and fully usable on its own. Beyond it there are exactly two paid add-ons.

Add-on	Scope
Business	every feature marked Business
Enterprise	every Enterprise feature — plus all Business features

Enterprise is not a second product alongside Business, it is the tier above it. Licensing Enterprise means you do not need Business separately. Which feature belongs to which tier is listed under Features; the Add-ons area of the dashboard shows the same mapping.

1. Buying

After purchase you receive the license key by email at the address given with the order. The key is a long string of three parts separated by dots and belongs to exactly one organisation.

What we need from you: the email address for delivery and the number of users to license. We do not need an installation or server identifier — the key is not bound to a particular machine, so you can move or rebuild your installation freely.

Keep the key safe

The key is the proof of your purchase. Keep the email or store the key in your password manager. We do reissue lost keys, but it costs you time.

2. Activating

Two values in your installation’s .env:

LICENSE_SERVER_URL=https://license.sentrymail.de
LICENSE_KEY=eyJhbGciOiJSUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9...

The key goes on one line, without quotes, without leading or trailing spaces and without a line break. Copy it from the email by double-clicking the string rather than dragging a selection — that way no space comes along.

Alternatively the key can be entered in the dashboard under Settings → License. A value in the .env takes precedence.

Then restart the stack:

docker compose up -d

restart is not enough

docker compose restart only restarts the process inside the existing container — the changed .env is not re-read. Use docker compose up -d; it detects the changed configuration and recreates the container.

3. What happens at startup

The add-ons are not part of the backend image. They are fetched at startup — through the license server, not from a package source on the internet:

flowchart LR
    Start([Container starts]) --> Ask[Backend asks the license server]
    Ask --> Check[License server checks the entitlement]
    Check --> Fetch[License server downloads and streams the package]
    Fetch --> Install[Backend installs the package]
    Install --> App([Application starts])
    Ask -->|unreachable or not licensed| App

Three properties you can rely on:

A failure never blocks your installation. If the license server is unreachable or the license has expired, SentryMail still starts — with the open-core scope. An outage on our side does not stop your operation.

Only changes are downloaded. If the package is already installed in the matching version, startup transfers nothing.

You need no credentials for a package source. The license server fetches the package itself and streams it through. Your installation only ever knows your license key.

4. Verifying activation

In the dashboard: the Add-ons area shows licensed and installed per tier. Both must be green — licensed but not installed means the fetch at startup did not succeed.

In the log:

docker compose logs backend | grep -i addons

Expected output on successful activation:

addons: business: humanshield_addon_business-0.18.1-py3-none-any.whl installiert
addons: enterprise: humanshield_addon_enterprise-0.17.1-py3-none-any.whl installiert

With a Business-only license just the first line appears; for Enterprise both appear, because Enterprise includes the Business features.

Why it says “humanshield”

The Python packages still carry the product’s former name. This is deliberate: renaming the package namespace would break existing installations on update without any benefit. Product, repositories and license server are called SentryMail; only the internal package names stayed as they were.

5. How activation works over time

Your installation fetches a short-lived clearance from the license server once a day, called a lease. It is valid for seven days.

That is your outage tolerance: if the license server is temporarily unreachable, your installation keeps working unchanged until the last fetched lease expires. Only then does it fall back to the open-core scope — it does not shut down and it loses no data.

No offline operation

An installation permanently disconnected from the internet cannot use the paid add-ons. Verification happens online only; there is deliberately no offline-valid licensing scheme. The core is unaffected and works without any connection.

6. What data leaves your server

You run SentryMail yourself so that your data stays with you. So here is the complete list of what the daily license check transmits:

Field	Content
license_key	your license key
instance_id	a random identifier generated at installation
product, product_version	product name and version
active_users	the number of active user accounts, as a figure

That is all. No names, no email addresses, no campaigns, no results, no content. active_users is a number with no link to individuals; it serves to reconcile against the licensed user count.

7. When a license ends

If your subscription lapses or is cancelled, entitlement ends with the last valid lease. What applies then:

• Your data is fully retained. Nothing is deleted.
• Evidence already produced stays readable — completions, certificates, reports. That is deliberate: you must be able to present your training records even after switching away.
• Open assignments are frozen, not discarded.
• New actions in the paid features are refused and the corresponding pages are locked.

If the license is renewed later, the features return with the next lease — no reinstallation required.

8. When something does not work

“License server unreachable” with Name or service not known A typo in LICENSE_SERVER_URL or a DNS problem. The value is exactly https://license.sentrymail.de, with no trailing slash. Check with:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' https://license.sentrymail.de/health

Expected: 200.

“Invalid license key” although the key is correct Almost always a transfer error: a space before the key, quotes around it, or a line break in the middle. Check the entry without displaying the key:

grep -c '^LICENSE_KEY=[A-Za-z0-9_.-]\+$' .env

1 means clean, 0 means something is attached to it.

The change to .env has no effect docker compose restart does not re-read the .env. Use docker compose up -d.

“Licensed but not installed” in the dashboard The license is valid but the package fetch at startup failed — usually because there was no connection at that moment. A docker compose up -d repeats the attempt. If it persists, the log helps:

docker compose logs backend | grep -i addons

If that does not get you further, send us those log lines — they contain neither your key nor any personal data.