We occasionally get clients wondering if Sentinel monitoring, maintenance, or DNS filtering might be causing a problem with their Mac's email. We want to provide some clarity.
There are three Sentinel service options: Sentinel (24/7 monitoring), Sentinel+ (monitoring + maintenance), and Sentinel Ultra (monitoring + maintenance + DNS filtering).
It's easy to dispense with Sentinel (24/7 monitoring) first. It does nothing to the system but report back information. There is virtually no chance it is implicated in any Mac problem you might be experiencing, email or otherwise.
Sentinel+ (maintenance) is device management software (Mosyle). It offers us a lot of control over client Macs to facilitate updates, scan and remove malware, etc. While it is possible to use Mosyle to manage many aspects of a client computer, we don't use it in the fashion. We take a very light approach, scanning and quarantining malware, issuing commands to update macOS, and a few other minor items.
Notably, we use the same Mosyle profiles for all Sentinel+ and Sentinel Ultra clients. If there's a problem with Mosyle, we should see it with every Mac we manage because we will have sent the same profiles and commands to all machines. If yours is the only report of a problem we've had, it's unlikely that Sentinel+ is the issue. (That said, we can uninstall it, see if anything changes, then reinstall if it's not the problem.)
Sentinel Ultra (DNS filtering) evaluates the information your web browser attempts to access then filters (blocks) any malevolent web sites. It does not interact with your email unless you're attempting to retrieve your email through your web browser, in which case it could be the culprit because it might be wrongly seeing your email web site as "bad." If that's the case, we can whitelist the site to fix the problem.
It's much more common for an email issue to related to the email server being offline. That means your email provider's computer is temporarily having an issue. Typically these come back online within an hour.
If your email issue is more persistent, you should consider looking at Apple's Mail Privacy Protection. It's a great feature, but we've seen it mess up legitimate email services more than once. This Apple Support article talks about Mail Privacy Protection: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102289. This third-party article offers specific steps for turning off Mail Privacy Protection: https://appuals.com/your-network-settings-prevent-content-from-loading-privately/
As always, we hope that the above is helpful. If you need our help, please call (503-507-0410) or email support@macatoz.com.
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