How a visitor subscribes
- The visitor opens Get updates by e-mail on your page and enters an address. The answer is the same whether the address is new, waiting or already subscribed, so the form cannot be used to find out who subscribed.
- The confirmation e-mail has a fixed text and nothing you wrote. Nothing is sent to the address until its owner opens the link and presses Confirm; a mail program that only opens the link confirms nobody.
- To stop, the visitor uses the link in any update e-mail. It takes one click, and no account is involved.
Writing updates
Under Incidents on the page, each incident has Updates for your readers. Choose Write an update, pick Investigating, Identified, Monitoring or Resolved, and write up to 1,000 characters of plain text. The update is on the public page at once and is e-mailed shortly after. Retract removes it from the page; e-mails that were already sent cannot be taken back.
What the e-mails say
- Only what the public page says: the page title, the site’s name as you gave it, the standard sentence or your public summary, and your updates. Never regions, error details or host names.
- An outage is announced once, however many checks of the site fail, and its end is mailed when the last of them has recovered. A site that goes down again within the hour is not announced again, an incident that keeps flapping is not mailed, and a page that hides its incidents sends nothing.
- These e-mails come from the service, not from your own mail domain. With your own name on the Agency and Agency Plus plans, your name stands in the subject and the first line (branding); the sender address is the service’s, and the line naming the operator of the service stays in the footer, because it is the sender.
Your list and your limits
Owners and admins see the confirmed addresses under E-mail subscribers on the status page, and can remove one. Addresses nobody confirmed are only counted and are deleted after 48 hours. The number of subscribers per page depends on your plan; the form says when a page is full. Your plan also has a daily budget of status e-mails for the whole organisation (a rolling 24 hours), and no subscriber gets more than ten a day; what the budget leaves out is counted next to the update. A suspended organisation or a page taken offline sends nothing, and an update you retract is not sent if it is still waiting. Posting an update to more than 100 subscribers asks you to sign in again with your second factor.
E-mail delivery to real inboxes has not been tested yet: the sending service is connected when the product goes live.