Hi Phil
The problem with RSS is that you get all feeds. There is no way of disaggregating the content to make it specific to the end user's individual server, as far as I can see.
Could you please review matters and come up with a more targeted solution that your customers want, rather than what you want to deliver? Have you surveyed your customers on how they would like to be notified?
I would have thought, in these days of Web 2.0 and personalisation, a step in the direction of automatic and individual notification would be well within the realm of possibility.
I take your point about email, but most of us have multiple webmail services as well eg Googlemail and the like (which we an also read on our PDAs when out and about). After all, it would be the height of daftness to rely on an email service from a broken server to inform you that the server was broken. And if we can get your online service alerts we can get webmail.
Finally, the whole nature of the service alerts isn't exactly what I would call easy to understand. Clarity of the server affected, the dates downtime began, expected outage and problem resolution steps could be vastly improved and make the whole end-user customer experience so much better.
Best wishes
David Ryedale