The University's mail server will be taken offline on Friday 2004/06/25 at about 4pm. The server is going to be physically relocated to a different part of the Struben machine room, something that may take up to half an hour to complete.
During this time both incoming and outgoing e-mail services (imap.ru.ac.za and mail.ru.ac.za) will be unavailable, as will the webmail service. Users will be unable to send e-mail from their computers until the service is restored -- doing so may result in the e-mail being defered and/or an error message being displayed by their e-mail client (Pegasus Mail, Outlook, etc).
All incoming e-mail from outside the University will be queued on the remote mail servers and will be delivered once the server comes back online. This is the normal, standards compliant operation of mail servers and as such no incoming e-mail should be lost as a result of this outage. It may take a couple of hours for all remote mail servers to retry their deliveries after the service is restored.