Subscribers and feeds

Visitors can follow a published status page by email or with a feed reader. This page covers how email subscriptions work, what a subscriber receives, the settings and limits that apply and the two feeds. Subscribers sign themselves up and only hear about the incidents you choose to send. The clients you add yourself, who receive every alert, are contacts.

How a visitor subscribes

The Get updates section of the public page shows a form that takes an email address. Subscribing takes two steps, so nobody can sign up an address that isn't theirs.

1. 1. The visitor enters an address

   The page sends a confirmation email. The link in it is valid for 7 days. A new request for the same address sends another email only after 10 minutes, and at most 3 confirmation emails go to one address while it's waiting.

2. 2. The visitor confirms

   The link opens a page with a Confirm button. Opening the link changes nothing by itself, because mail scanners open every link in a message. The subscription starts when the visitor presses the button.

The form gives the same answer for every address, so it never tells a visitor whether someone is already subscribed. A visitor sees the form only while the page is accepting subscribers, which the settings below explain.

What a subscriber receives

A subscriber receives the incident updates you choose to send and nothing else. OctoPing never emails a subscriber because a check failed.

• Tick Notify subscribers when you declare an incident or post an update. It's ticked by default, except when you declare an incident that's already Resolved, and you can turn it off for any update. Resolving an incident is an update, so it can be sent too.
• Editing or deleting an incident never sends mail.
• Maintenance windows appear on the status page and aren't emailed.
• One incident can email up to 10 updates. After that the checkbox is locked and the API refuses the request.

Who gets an update

An update goes to the subscribers who had confirmed by the time you posted it. Someone who confirms later doesn't receive it. If you post a newer emailed update on the same incident while an older one is still going out, the people who haven't received the older one get only the newer one.

When OctoPing doesn't send

The incident timeline records the outcome beside each update: Emailing subscribers, Emailed to subscribers with a count, Not emailed with the reason, or Partly emailed. The reasons are an unpublished page, a workspace whose plan is paused, and the emailed-update limit. A send that hasn't finished 24 hours after you posted it is dropped. A skipped update isn't sent later when the cause goes away, so post a new update instead. A large list is sent gradually, which means the last subscriber can receive the message some minutes after the first.

The email

The sender name is the page title, and Reply-To is the address in the settings below. The subject begins with the incident status in brackets, followed by the incident title. The body has the page name, the status and impact, the update text, the time it was posted in UTC, a link to the incident and an unsubscribe link. The message doesn't name OctoPing and has no tracking pixel. If the page has an active custom domain, the links use it.

Settings and limits

The Email Subscribers card on the status page's settings shows the state of the page and holds the settings.

The card says Closed and gives one of these reasons whenever the form is hidden.

The subscriber allowance belongs to the workspace and covers every page in it. Confirmed subscribers and contacts use the same allowance, and a pending signup doesn't count until it's confirmed. The number for each plan is on Pricing. Reaching it blocks new signups and never stops mail to the people already subscribed.

Manage subscribers

The list below the settings shows each subscriber's address and state. Anyone who can view the page can read it, and search finds an address.

An Admin can export the list as a CSV file and can remove a subscriber, which erases the row. A removed address that was suppressed can subscribe again, so remove one only when you have a reason to.

Unsubscribing and suppression

• Every email has an unsubscribe link and the standard one-click header that mail apps use for their Unsubscribe button.
• The link opens a page with an Unsubscribe button. Opening the link alone changes nothing.
• Pending signups whose link expired are deleted, and a subscriber who unsubscribed is deleted after 30 days. A suppressed address is kept, so the page never mails it again.
• A hard bounce suppresses the address on every page, whatever kind of message bounced. A spam complaint about a subscriber email does the same.

Feeds

Every published page has two feeds, an Atom feed and an RSS feed. They carry incidents, not item status, and they need no subscription.

• Each feed lists the page's 50 newest incidents, newest first. An entry's text is the latest update on the incident.
• A feed is cached for 5 minutes, and changes you save clear the cache.
• A feed supports conditional requests, so a reader that sends its last ETag gets an empty answer when nothing changed.
• The page advertises both feeds to feed readers and links them under Get updates.
• A feed on a custom domain names the domain itself in its own address, so a reader that saves the address never sees OctoPing's.

Feeds work whether or not email subscriptions are on.

Related pages

• Status pages covers incidents and the timeline.
• Custom domains covers the addresses on your client's domain.
• Status page JSON is the JSON equivalent.