MAJOR PROBLEM!!! BUYER BEWARE!!!

We need to be able to send when the Coffee Cup web site is down. We were trying to send out our weekly email blast this afternoon, but couldn't even export our file because the Coffee Cup web site was down for maintenance. This is absolutely unacceptable for software we've paid for.

I understand your frustration Renata, as an Internet based business we have experienced similar delays caused by unexpected events ourselves. And although they happen very infrequently, our last incident must have happened (way) before you became a customer, unfortunately they still can't be ruled out completely. Where possible we will be taking further steps to prevent this (about 4 hours of downtime, not related to maintenance, but caused by an unlikely human error occurring at one of our upstream providers) to cause any issues for our customers.

To be fair though, to give our customers the needed flexibility, the email can be exported or sent when our servers are unavailable. It is less convenient, scripts are not refreshed and the images must be uploaded to (any) server manually and linked into the design, but very possible.

And we believe that to be key — I don't think it will help here to get into a comparison of what others offer in terms of flexibility or how many times other services are unavailable, but I strongly believe we are one of the few out there that try to make a business by providing our customers with excellent products that work online and offline and allow for usage anywhere. Not just our servers or service, although our long term mission is that we make this so reliable and convenient that this will be the choice of most of our customers.

Please accept our (my) apologies for the unexpected downtime (for maintenance we would have sent out a note so everybody could have planned accordingly). We are determined to make this up to you, and everybody else that was affected by this 4 hour window, by providing an even more reliable service and email designer that's even more beyond comparison.

Two notes:
1. I certainly understand Renata's frustration, but this is exactly why it pays to schedule your email beforehand and use an actual email sending service (like MailChim, ConstantContact, or others)
2. Bob, I was not aware of this offline capability. Are there any steps (other than self-hosting our images) that need to be taken to force an email to export when CoffeeCup servers are unavailable?

Yes, RED is not a sending service but focussed on what gets delivered creates the utmost positive experience for the recipient: a creative, readable, clickable and overall usable email design across email clients including mobile ones. It is not that these sending services never have outages though...and they don't offer an offline alternative.
Simply linking in your images (making sure there are no images in the project file) is enough. You might need to go to account settings and logout. Except for some inconvenience the main thing you'll be missing are the live script updates - they are still recommended for display consistency, but every once in awhile you can do without them I think.