On Friday 9th June, starting at around 4PM, the computer that runs the University's IMAP server will be upgraded. Users will be unable to read their e-mail until such time as the upgrade is complete. It is anticipated that this upgrade will take no more than a few hours but users should expect to be without incoming e-mail until Saturday morning.
Outgoing e-mail sent from clients such as Pegaus Mail or Outlook should be unaffected by this outage. Users will not be able to use the webmail client as this relies on the IMAP server to log in.
Incoming e-mail that arrives during the outage should also be unaffected -- the remote mail server should simply queue the e-mail for re-delivery once the upgrade is complete. This may result in e-mail being delayed slightly longer than usual.
For those who are interested in the technicalities, the operating system on the machine will be upgraded from FreeBSD 5.4 to FreeBSD 6.1. This is a major upgrade and requires the recompilation of all packages on the machine once the operating system upgrade is complete. So whilst the operating system upgrade should be completed within half an hour or so, it'll take a fair while for the package upgrades to complete. We'll only re-allow access to the machine once the bulk of this is completed and has been tested.