There are two major types of outages: planned and unplanned.
Unscheduled outages and service disruptions are announced via Twitter. This could be a delay in mail, a partial outage (where some users are having a problem, or some attempts will succeed), problems with the website, or problems with other major ISPs. We also announce our new blog posts, and items of general email interest on Twitter.
You may get these notifications in a number of ways:
- They are automatically posted to the top of the Services page
- You can go to http://www.twitter.com/pobox
- You can follow @pobox in one of the many Twitter applications for your computer or cell phone.
For the most part, Pobox is designed to minimize complete outages. In particular, we have not had a complete outage of mail forwarding or SMTP services (outbound mail service) in many years.
However, some services are harder to make distributed, like the website, webmail and Mailstore (your Pobox inbox), and those services may have scheduled outages.
We try to provide notifications of those outages at least a week in advance to the affected users. Unless the issue affects only a small subset of users, it will be announced via Twitter. Major outages, or outages affecting only a small fraction of all users, may also have an email announcement. To make sure you get those notifications, please check your administrative message settings (which is also where we send password reset requests.) Scheduled outages rarely last more than 2 hours.