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There's as least one provider that offiers a free port 25 redirection service, Roller Network. There are some data transfer limits (it's free, duh) but the paid service to release the limits is damn cheap compared to others once you realize they use a soft limit system.

Companies like rollernet provide said alternatives for $5/mo. Not for free, though.

http://rollernet.us/ is EXACTLY what you want. They're an email provider. $5/month gets you your IMAP box. Plus oodles of email-related features and an uncluttered web management interface.

Roller Network (www.rollernet.us) provides email service under a different model; one price for unlimited domains/mailboxes and no quotas. Account levels are based on how many megabytes of mail you send and receive. Extremely affordable once you realize how much you get for their entry level account compared to other providers. Also one of the few that offers Sieve filtering. They also have DNS services, but they pretty much focus on email.

You don't want to mess with BGP unless you have plenty of money to have a redundant location, and a large enough IP block to justify it. You may find an ISP that has this set up or their own block, but I don't know of any.

The way to go is DNS. For an example of this, look at Akamai:
(Removed because of the fucking lameness filter. It was a very useful DNS lookup. Try 'dig images.apple.com' to see what I saw.)

It's done using an extremely short TTL on the final A record. Obviously this handles the vast majority of cases. I also recommend having a backup DNS site hosted by someone ELSE! Set up your two locations, and host DNS on them, but have third and fourth DNS servers that are authoritative for your domain. That way if your main site is down, you can switch to secondary, but if secondary goes down, you can set up something else in a pinch and point your backup DNS at it. If you don't have this, there's no chance you'll get back up in less than a day, as you'll have to change your domain's DNS servers.

Also, if you're hosting email for you domain, set up a mail forwarding service that will hold your mail or deliver it to various addresses while your main site is down.

I used Rollernet for both of these services, but I currently only use them for Secondary DNS, since my mail is now hosted by TuffMail. As a former LFS-building home-server-roller, it's nice to have others dealing with that stuff.

Finding someone to hop email (for free) is not so easy - the only place I've found that does this and actually works well is http://acc.rollernet.us/ Consider donating some cash to the guys - it's a good service. (I'm not affiliated by the way, just some random nobody)