# Maintenance

> What happens during updates, restarts and maintenance, what you may notice and what we do not promise for it.

> **Status on 8 November 2026:** The Free plan runs as a test phase. We promise no availability, and the service may restart or be disrupted without advance notice.

## What maintenance means here

By maintenance we mean work on the server and on the software of the service during which something may be temporarily unreachable. There are three kinds.

## Three kinds of maintenance

### Operating system updates

**What happens.** The server installs software updates automatically and may restart at night to do so. Further restarts are possible.

**What you may notice.** During a restart the website, account, webmail and mail apps are unreachable. Open connections drop.

### New version of the website

**What happens.** The server checks the source every two minutes, builds each change as a new, signed release and switches over in a single step only after all checks. If a step fails, the previous state stays online.

**What you may notice.** You see the new state. The footer of the page names the commit of the running state.

### Change of the service software

**What happens.** Before the software is changed we make an interim copy of the account database on the same server. Details are in the [Privacy information](https://privymail.eu/en/privacy-free.md).

**What you may notice.** During that time, functions may temporarily not work. We do not promise how long.

## What we do not promise

- No particular availability: no percentage, no response time and no round-the-clock standby. The basis is in the [Terms of use](https://privymail.eu/en/terms-free.md), section 3.2.
- No advance notice of restarts and outages.
- No fixed maintenance window.
- No maintenance page that appears by itself. When the server restarts, it does not answer, and your browser or mail app shows its own error message. This page and the [Status](https://privymail.eu/en/status.md) page sit on the same server.

## What you can do

- If a connection dropped, try again later.
- If the error persists, write to us through the [Contact](https://privymail.eu/en/contact.md) page. Never send a password or an app password.
- What we can and cannot evidence about operations is under [Status](https://privymail.eu/en/status.md), the state of the building blocks in the [Roadmap](https://privymail.eu/en/roadmap.md).

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- privymail.eu: patchletter UG (haftungsbeschränkt) · Germany
- Commit: `71cd013265df`
- This page as HTML: https://privymail.eu/en/maintenance/
- Deutsche Fassung: https://privymail.eu/maintenance.md