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Tuffmail was a service I chose because it was the best but it also happens to be a Canadian company.

http://www.tuffmail.com/

Australia? No thanks. Not exactly the bastion of privacy laws...

In US jurisdiction: Tuffmail or LuxSci
In Europe: euMX

I like tuffmail's server-side spam policy but how does it compare to Gmail's? Is it the same or more stringent - or can it be configured to be more stringent?

Yet they don't offer encryption. Lame.

What is your motive? You've posted that twice in this thread, yet the site is clear in several places that encryption is offered. Perhaps you want to see this comprehensive matrix of encryption offerings on various ports for various services.

And $50/year won't give you 7GB of storage.

I have more interesting things to worry about than some upper limit which I'm not an eighth of the way to reaching. Incidentally, the Tuffmail text filter is great for stripping HTML and attachments from mail for archiving (as well as reading on restricted platforms).

Dunno what you are talking about, Tuffmail supports TLS and SSL over a variety of ports, for both IMAP and SMTP traffic.

All the email I ever send to or retrieve from Tuffmail has been over a secured connection.

In fact, you can even manage your Sieve filters over an SSL connection.

Additionally, their webmail client (which ain't so great, but I only use it in emergencies) uses HTTPS.

This takes about 2 seconds to discover on their website - not exactly hidden information.

Yeah, if only Google offered the features of even a smalltime dedicated mailserver provider, as well as downtime of under an hour per year averaged over the last 5 years, I might question the onerous burden that is under $50/year for enterprise level e-mail configurability and availability.

Tuffmail remains cooler, and has not sold out. Happy customer for several years.

Wow Google apps really prices out all these guys by a lot

Tuffmail remains cooler, and has not sold out. Happy customer for several years.

imho, the best email-only provider is http://www.tuffmail.com/

I used to run my own mail server, but since I now live in a rural area with poor Internet connectivity options, I decided that I wanted to host my email elsewhere. I don't want advertisements inserted in my email, so that ruled out the free services. I wanted a a business-class provider providing IMAP service, with technical competence and the ability to serve non-WIndows users (I primarily used Linux at the time, but have since switched to using a Mac for most purposes). I've seen far too many companies with shiny web pages but no brains behind them. After doing some research, I picked out Tuffmail. They appeared to provide the services that I wanted at a price that I was willing to pay, and their web page was heavy on technical details and light on flashy clip art of people wearing nice clothes and phone headsets.

I've been happy with their service, and their spam filters seem to work well for me. They offer IMAP, POP, and a web mail interface. I have had no trouble using their IMAP server from Linux, Mac, Windows or my iPhone. Their Bayesian filter is easy to train by dropping mis-identified emails into appropriate folders, and they also have both blacklisting and whitelisting, accessible from a web page. I set up my account to automatically dump mailing list traffic into folders other than my main inbox.

I'd recommend them without hesitation to any other technically-savvy folks who need good email service. I also would happily use them for business email if I ever found myself starting up a small company and I didn't have a business need to host my own server(s).

They silently drop messages they think are spam with no recourse on your part. You can't turn off this filtering and you can't inspect messages that are dropped or even find out how many are dropped.

I was a fairly satisfied customer of their paid email plan until they turned this "feature" on and I started losing messages. Email sent from Japanese cell phones, for example, seemed to get dropped about 50% of the time.

I've since switched to Tuffmail and haven't looked back.

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.

http://www.tuffmail.com/

I know of one: Tuffmail http://www.tuffmail.com/. Reasonable price, outstanding support.