Sentinare Support
Sentinare Messaging Solutions Support
Tutorials, FAQ and Helpdesk
Frequently Asked Questions
General Questions
What is Spam?
Can I still use your service if I don't have my own mail server?
Can I still use your spam filtering service if I don't have my own domain?
How do I access my mail that is hosted with Sentinare?
What are the benefits of having my own domain and what domain I can have?
How do I setup Thunderbird to use IMAP?
How do I setup Outlook to use POP?
How do I setup Outlook to use IMAP?
Sentinare PostGuard
What is Suspected Ham?
What is a False Positive?
What are False Negatives?
What's my Whitelist all about?
What's my Blacklist all about?
Why are the images blocked in my emails?
Why is my email not being filtered?
Sentinare Security
Is it safe to check my email from an internet café?
How can I secure our email server?
What is the best way to protect my internal mail server from SMTP attack?
Frequently Answered Questions
General Questions
What is Spam?
You've probably seen, heard or even used the term "spamming" to refer to the act of sending unsolicited commercial email (UCE), or "spam" to refer to the UCE itself.
Use of the term "spam" was adopted as a result of the Monty Python skit in which the SPAM meat product was featured. In this skit, a group of Vikings sang a chorus of "spam, spam, spam..." in an increasing crescendo, drowning out other conversation. Hence, the analogy applied because UCE was drowning out normal discourse on the Internet.
Can I still use your service if I don't have my own mail server?
Absolutely. We offer the most secure email hosting service available. We can provide you with a complete email solution for individuals and entire organizations
Can I still use your spam filtering service if I don't have my own domain?
Sure, as long as your current email provider supports POP3 access to your email. We offer a service that can automatically connect to your current email account and retrieve your emails. The email is then scanned and filtered for spam and viruses. You will now check your email from our servers and enjoy spam and virus free email.
How do I access my mail that is hosted with Sentinare?
The name of the server for accessing all mail services is "mail.sentinare.com". Our servers support the IMAP and POP3 protocols, so you can use any email client that also supports these protocols. In addition we provide you with access to your mail through a website interface to give you convenient access from any internet connections.
What are the benefits of having my own domain and what domain I can have?
Having your own domain gives you complete control of your online presence. Just like phone number portability that lets you choose what phone service provider you want to use for your phone number, owning your own domain name works much in the same way. With your own domain you can control who provides your email hosting service, your website hosting, your FTP hosting and more. Your own domain gives you complete control, and never ties you down to someone else's domain.
How do I setup Thunderbird to use IMAP?
Read our instructions on setting up Mozilla Thunderbird to use an IMAP account.
How do I setup Outlook to use POP?
Read our instructions on setting up Outlook to use a POP account.
How do I setup Outlook to use IMAP?
Read our instructions on setting up Outlook to use an IMAP account.
Sentinare PostGuard
What is Suspected Ham?
Suspected Ham is mail that Sentinare PostGuard thinks is probably legitimate mail (so-called "ham", because it's "not spam"). To view this mail and confirm (or deny) this diagnosis, visit your "ham cache" by clicking the Report Spam link.
What is a False Positive?
False Positives occur when Sentinare PostGuard mistakenly thinks that a piece of legitimate mail is spam, and quarantines it instead of delivering it to your inbox. These are errors, in effect, and considered by most people to be the worst kind, since it blocks legitimate mail. Fortunately Sentinare PostGuard lets you rescue this kind of mail from the Quarantine, so this mail is not actually lost.
What are False Negatives?
False Negatives occur when Sentinare PostGuard mistakenly thinks that a piece of spam is legitimate mail, and lets it slip through to your mailbox. These are annoying mistakes on the part of the spam filter, but not as troublesome as false positives. The spam filter is biased heavily toward false negatives, and away from false positives, so it's normal to expect it to make more of this type of mistake. When this happens, you should use the Report Spam link to point out the spam and help Sentinare PostGuard learn from the mistake. If you do this, over time you will notice fewer and fewer false negatives as PostGuard will become more and more accurate.
What's my Whitelist all about?
Your whitelist lets you specify that mail coming from specific senders (or entire domains) should not be spam-checked, and should be delivered to you regardless of its content. It's a way of making sure that you don't inadvertently block mail from people you know and trust. We encourage you to only use whitelists and blacklists as a last resort since doing so will bypass the "learning" component of the PostGuard filter.
What's my Blacklist all about?
Your blacklist is effectively the opposite of your whitelist--it lets you specify that mail coming from specific senders (or entire domains) should never be delivered to you, under any circumstances. Senders on this list will be blocked, regardless of the content of their mail. We encourage you to only use whitelists and blacklists as a last resort since doing so will bypass the "learning" component of the PostGuard filter.
Why are the images blocked in my emails?
Emails can contain offensive images or can contain invisible images that tell the sender that you have opened that email (and thus verify that your email address is active). To prevent spammers from subjecting you to these images, and further protect your privacy, we block images from displaying within PostGuard. Once images are delivered to your inbox however, you will be able to view these images.
Why is my email not being filtered?
Check to make sure you have removed the configuration to check your old email server. If another email client is accessing the same POP/IMAP mailbox, then it may potentially grab mail items before the Sentinare email fetching process, rendering the service useless.
Sentinare Security
Is it safe to check my email from an internet café?
Mail protocols are typically sent across the wire (or wireless, as it were) in the clear. Passive email eavesdropping is an exercise anyone can learn to do. It requires very little skill to download and install network sniffing software and begin reading every email that passes across the network. The highestest forms of encryption possible are available on all Sentinare services (including IMAP, POP, Webmail, and outbound SMTP). If you enable TLS (preferred) or SSL in your client, passive eavesdropping will not be possible. All of the email traffic between the Sentinare servers and your email/web client will be encrypted and undecipherable to the passive sniffer.
How can I secure our email server?
Once you switch your MX records over to Sentinare you can setup a firewall rule to only allow your network to accept incoming traffic on port 25 from our servers. Doing so will greatly increase your networks security, since mail servers are often the first place hackers will try to attack.
What is the best way to protect my internal mail server from SMTP attack?
If you sign up with Sentinare, you can block access from the public internet to your server (port 25). By setting up your firewall/router ACL (access control list) to allow mail connections originating only from Sentinare's network, you can achieve maximum protection for your internal server. You will be essentially immune the next time a security bug is found for your MTA of choice.