[upofadown]

My city does email for alerts and RSS for news releases.

>But it still locks the information up inside my email inbox, and subjects it to the fragility of email delivery these days; will the town’s email servers be allowed to deliver the message?

I think in practice that fragility is mostly Gmail and some of the other big free email providers. Email providers that actually care will normally make it so you can at least get your email reliably.