Cisco 300-720 SESA study guide
Cisco 300-720 SESA · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The 300-720 SESA (Securing Email with Cisco Email Security Appliance) is a Cisco specialist exam aimed at security and messaging engineers who deploy, operate, and troubleshoot the Cisco Email Security Appliance (ESA). It suits administrators responsible for mail flow, policy, and content protection in enterprise environments, as well as consultants and support engineers who validate their hands-on ESA skills. The Cisco 300-720 SESA study guide has 5 sections and about 2,110 words.
01ESA Deployment and Administration
This domain tests whether you can bring an ESA into service and keep it administrable: appliance models and virtual options, listeners, host and recipient access control, routing, clustering, and safe configuration management through the AsyncOS commit model. Deployment shapes: standalone appliance, hardware or virtual, and clustered appliances under centralized management.
461 words, about 2 min02Email Authentication and Encryption
This domain covers proving who sent a message and protecting it in transit or at rest: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC verification and signing, plus TLS policy, certificates, and message encryption on the ESA. SPF checks the sending IP against the domain's published record.
415 words, about 2 min03Spam, Virus, and Outbreak Filtering
This domain tests configuration of the scanning layers that decide whether a message is delivered, quarantined, or dropped: anti-spam scoring, anti-virus engines, AMP file reputation and analysis, outbreak filters, and graymail handling, all bound to mail policies. Anti-spam returns a score; positive scores indicate spam, negative scores indicate likely legitimate mail.
402 words, about 2 min04Content Filters, Message Policies, and Data Loss Prevention
This domain covers the policy engine that inspects message content and takes action: content filters, CLI message filters, mail policy binding, and DLP classifiers with their responses such as encryption, quarantine, or drop. Content filters are built in the GUI and attached to mail policies; they combine conditions (sender, recipient, subject, body, attachment type, dictionary or regex match, connection details) with actions (drop, quarantine, add header, notify, send to alternate host, encrypt).
406 words, about 2 min05ESA Integration and Troubleshooting
This domain tests connecting the ESA to the rest of the mail architecture, directory services, management appliances, and syslog, and diagnosing delivery failures with the built-in tools. LDAP/AD integration drives recipient acceptance, routing, and SMTP authentication through queries.
426 words, about 2 min