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Rackspace Mail. $2/mo/mailbox. 100% uptime SLA. 24/7/365 phone, email and chat support -- you can call and talk to someone with power to solve your problem at 3

Rackspace Mail. $2/mo/mailbox. 100% uptime SLA. 24/7/365 phone, email and chat support -- you can call and talk to someone with power to solve your problem at 3AM on Christmas Eve. Big mailboxes, configurable backups, good spam filters. Instant e-mail notifications in your choice of native desktop/mobile clients with IMAP push, or use their hosted webmail. If you aren't fully addicted to the Gmail interface, there are better options for business mailbox hosting.

Bjoern 13y ago
100% uptime is technically impossible. For eMail its not even necessary as failure to deliver will result in automatic retry for some time.
- gte910h 13y ago
  100% uptime SLA doesn't mean it will be up 100%, it means you get paid for every X is isn't up in that period.
lubos 13y ago
Or $19/month get a Mailgun.net account (also run by Rackspace) and use it as a redirection service into individual free gmail (or google apps) accounts.
- dools 13y ago
  I do the same thing for free with my domain registration company and then pop all my messages off gmail using fetchmail for good measure. I then send through an external smtp server. All the fun of gmail, no reliance on Google. I actually also tried to pay them before setting that all up and they couldn't sort it out.
- thibaut_barrere 13y ago
  Similarly, if you use DNSimple you can enable email-forwarding on your domains [1]. That's the solution I use for my SaaS product so far. [1] http://support.dnsimple.com/articles/email-forwarding http://support.dnsimple.com/articles/email-forwarding
andybak 13y ago
No reason not to use a 3rd party IMAP/POP and still use the Gmail front-end. Best of both worlds.
- mike-cardwell 13y ago
  You're just adding more points of failure.
  - pyre 13y ago
    I thought that a single point of failure was a bad thing. Sure you might want to only have a single place where things can fail, but if that failure is catastrophic...
    - Drakim 13y ago
      No, adding more points of failure doesn't make the first potential point of failure more fail-proof, or anything like that.
    - carbocation 13y ago
      If adding a new layer (gmail) creates a new point of failure without creating any new resilience against failure, you're putting yourself into a bad position. Think about failure like resistance. Points of failure in parallel gives less overall risk of failure. Points of failure in serial (like adding a front-end) gives greater overall risk of failure.
    - nknighthb 13y ago
      "Single point of failure" means a point at which a failure effectively breaks the entire system or workflow. A system may have many SPOFs, which is worse than a single SPOF, which is, in turn, worse than no SPOFs (that is, the desired case is no single failure kills forward progress).
      - squidi 13y ago
        Yes, extra points of failure may include: - Having webmail which is not protected with two factor authentication - Enabling POP/IMAP which also does not have two factor authentication
msy 13y ago
I've been using Rackspace mail for a few years now, flawless service and shockingly good customer support - helpful, competent people available instantly, cannot recommend enough. Given our email accounts our the skeleton keys of our digital lives relying on a free service, or even a paid service where support is something the company sees as a numbers game seems madness. My only gripe is the lack of support for two-factor authentication, apparently this is under development currently.
- kngspook 13y ago
  My only gripe with Rackspace is how long it takes for them to push out a new version of Exchange when they're released... Was something like a year and a half after Exchange 2010 was released before it appeared on Rackspace? Curious to see how long before 2013 appears... Otherwise I love them.
Osmium 13y ago
I've recently converted to Fastmail.fm, which seems great and they have a nice web interface too. They're now owned by Opera, so I assume their data retention policies must be consistent with EU law, though I think they have servers based in the US so I'm not sure what that means in practice. What I'd like is a service that kept my emails encrypted on-disk with my user password. Not because I think emails are private -- they're not in the sense that I fully expect someone could intercept them in transit, even if that would be illegal -- but just because it would give reassurances that my emails can't be data-mined for advertising purposes à la gmail, or if the mailserver had a major security vulnerability, a hacker couldn't copy all my emails wholesale. But I don't know of any service that provides this, nor of a way to do it myself easily (any mailserver I set up myself would probably have far more vulnerabilities than one I rent from someone else!).
- JohnTHaller 13y ago
  Unfortunately, most folks would not pay the extra fees that would be necessary for implementing a service like this. And the NSA wouldn't like it as they couldn't just ping Google's server and read all your mail from Gmail.
  - Osmium 13y ago
    I'm paying for Fastmail anyway, so I don't think it's that unreasonable for a paid service.
voidlogic 13y ago
Or a $10/mo Digital Ocean VM running Zimbra 8 Community Edition.. https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.blog.zimbra.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/conversation1.jpeg https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.blog.zimbra.com/wp-content/...
ishbits 13y ago
Hows the Rackspace web mail interface?
ozataman 13y ago
That's great - I love worthy and proper competition combatting nonchalant/tyrant attitude of incumbent giants. It is so annoying to deal with customer service reps that act like they are your boss and you're inconveniencing them through your questions. The stronger the company, the more of those reps you'll get. Thanks for posting this!
eli 13y ago
SLA is sort of a red herring here. If my email goes down, getting a partial or full refund on my $2/month mailbox fee is the least of my concerns.
- e1ven 13y ago
  The point of the SLA here isn't so much to save you the $2, but to make it cost them $2 * N accounts. This gives them an economic incentive to avoid problems.
  - eli 13y ago
    Yeah, fair enough, but regardless of any SLA, I wouldn't expect to be charged full price for inadequate service. Not if you want my continued business anyway.
rgbrenner 13y ago
I used to love rackspace... but had a really bad experience recently. I was using Rackspace Files as a CDN for my ecommerce site. One of my customers emailed me saying that the graphics were missing from the site. Turned out 2 of the 3 zones were down, according to status.rackspace.com. They fixed it about 12 hours after it started IIRC. They never sent an email notifying me of the down time. Then -- and this is where they destroyed my trust in their service -- I took a look at the status panel the following day, and they cleared the history of the downtime (it shows 30 days of issues). Instead of showing the issue, they marked it as green and deleted the messages describing the issue. That day, I stopped using Rackspace for everything. (This was about a month ago)
- rgbrenner 13y ago
  Interesting.. I just looked at their status panel, and the downtime is there, including all of the messages. They were definitely missing the day after it happened. Still disappointed they don't send out emails when there's downtime.. Would probably use them again the future. (This was my one negative experience with them, btw)

Bjoern 13y ago

100% uptime is technically impossible. For eMail its not even necessary as failure to deliver will result in automatic retry for some time.

gte910h 13y ago
100% uptime SLA doesn't mean it will be up 100%, it means you get paid for every X is isn't up in that period.

lubos 13y ago

Or $19/month get a Mailgun.net account (also run by Rackspace) and use it as a redirection service into individual free gmail (or google apps) accounts.

dools 13y ago
I do the same thing for free with my domain registration company and then pop all my messages off gmail using fetchmail for good measure. I then send through an external smtp server. All the fun of gmail, no reliance on Google. I actually also tried to pay them before setting that all up and they couldn't sort it out.
thibaut_barrere 13y ago
Similarly, if you use DNSimple you can enable email-forwarding on your domains [1]. That's the solution I use for my SaaS product so far. [1] http://support.dnsimple.com/articles/email-forwarding http://support.dnsimple.com/articles/email-forwarding

andybak 13y ago

No reason not to use a 3rd party IMAP/POP and still use the Gmail front-end. Best of both worlds.

mike-cardwell 13y ago
You're just adding more points of failure.
- pyre 13y ago
  I thought that a single point of failure was a bad thing. Sure you might want to only have a single place where things can fail, but if that failure is catastrophic...
  - Drakim 13y ago
    No, adding more points of failure doesn't make the first potential point of failure more fail-proof, or anything like that.
  - carbocation 13y ago
    If adding a new layer (gmail) creates a new point of failure without creating any new resilience against failure, you're putting yourself into a bad position. Think about failure like resistance. Points of failure in parallel gives less overall risk of failure. Points of failure in serial (like adding a front-end) gives greater overall risk of failure.
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    "Single point of failure" means a point at which a failure effectively breaks the entire system or workflow. A system may have many SPOFs, which is worse than a single SPOF, which is, in turn, worse than no SPOFs (that is, the desired case is no single failure kills forward progress).
    - squidi 13y ago
      Yes, extra points of failure may include: - Having webmail which is not protected with two factor authentication - Enabling POP/IMAP which also does not have two factor authentication

msy 13y ago

I've been using Rackspace mail for a few years now, flawless service and shockingly good customer support - helpful, competent people available instantly, cannot recommend enough. Given our email accounts our the skeleton keys of our digital lives relying on a free service, or even a paid service where support is something the company sees as a numbers game seems madness. My only gripe is the lack of support for two-factor authentication, apparently this is under development currently.

kngspook 13y ago
My only gripe with Rackspace is how long it takes for them to push out a new version of Exchange when they're released... Was something like a year and a half after Exchange 2010 was released before it appeared on Rackspace? Curious to see how long before 2013 appears... Otherwise I love them.

Osmium 13y ago

I've recently converted to Fastmail.fm, which seems great and they have a nice web interface too. They're now owned by Opera, so I assume their data retention policies must be consistent with EU law, though I think they have servers based in the US so I'm not sure what that means in practice. What I'd like is a service that kept my emails encrypted on-disk with my user password. Not because I think emails are private -- they're not in the sense that I fully expect someone could intercept them in transit, even if that would be illegal -- but just because it would give reassurances that my emails can't be data-mined for advertising purposes à la gmail, or if the mailserver had a major security vulnerability, a hacker couldn't copy all my emails wholesale. But I don't know of any service that provides this, nor of a way to do it myself easily (any mailserver I set up myself would probably have far more vulnerabilities than one I rent from someone else!).

JohnTHaller 13y ago
Unfortunately, most folks would not pay the extra fees that would be necessary for implementing a service like this. And the NSA wouldn't like it as they couldn't just ping Google's server and read all your mail from Gmail.
- Osmium 13y ago
  I'm paying for Fastmail anyway, so I don't think it's that unreasonable for a paid service.

voidlogic 13y ago

Or a $10/mo Digital Ocean VM running Zimbra 8 Community Edition.. https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.blog.zimbra.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/conversation1.jpeg https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.blog.zimbra.com/wp-content/...

ishbits 13y ago

Hows the Rackspace web mail interface?

ozataman 13y ago

That's great - I love worthy and proper competition combatting nonchalant/tyrant attitude of incumbent giants. It is so annoying to deal with customer service reps that act like they are your boss and you're inconveniencing them through your questions. The stronger the company, the more of those reps you'll get. Thanks for posting this!

eli 13y ago

SLA is sort of a red herring here. If my email goes down, getting a partial or full refund on my $2/month mailbox fee is the least of my concerns.

e1ven 13y ago
The point of the SLA here isn't so much to save you the $2, but to make it cost them $2 * N accounts. This gives them an economic incentive to avoid problems.
- eli 13y ago
  Yeah, fair enough, but regardless of any SLA, I wouldn't expect to be charged full price for inadequate service. Not if you want my continued business anyway.

rgbrenner 13y ago

I used to love rackspace... but had a really bad experience recently. I was using Rackspace Files as a CDN for my ecommerce site. One of my customers emailed me saying that the graphics were missing from the site. Turned out 2 of the 3 zones were down, according to status.rackspace.com. They fixed it about 12 hours after it started IIRC. They never sent an email notifying me of the down time. Then -- and this is where they destroyed my trust in their service -- I took a look at the status panel the following day, and they cleared the history of the downtime (it shows 30 days of issues). Instead of showing the issue, they marked it as green and deleted the messages describing the issue. That day, I stopped using Rackspace for everything. (This was about a month ago)

rgbrenner 13y ago
Interesting.. I just looked at their status panel, and the downtime is there, including all of the messages. They were definitely missing the day after it happened. Still disappointed they don't send out emails when there's downtime.. Would probably use them again the future. (This was my one negative experience with them, btw)