FastMail, my e-mail provider (which I am no longer recommending), has had my account down for most of the day Friday and it looks like the downtime will continue through the weekend. This downtime is more problematic to me than their last partial outage, since this one affects my main account. I was hopeful that their last disaster would prompt them to get reasonable disaster recovery plans in place - it appears not.
I’m looking into alternative e-mail hosting options (TuffMail, Zimbra, etc.), however I probably won’t be able to set anything up until after my vacation. Feel free to post suggestions e-mail hosting suggestions (including referral links) in the comments. Minimum requirements include:
- Solid track-record for reliability and uptime
- 1 GB disk space (currently use ~600MB)
- 500 MB monthly transfer (with ability to purchase more as needed)
- IMAP support
- Spam Assassin and Sieve support, or equivilent
- Rule-based forwarding
- SSL access
- “Any port access” via a proxy server
- Import/migrate from existing account/mailbox functionality
The timing is pretty bad since I’m out of WIFI and EVDO range through the weekend and can’t do much to set up alternative solutions (Pulse works, but is slow). Special thanks to Scott for helping get a copy of my mail forwarding to my Gmail account as a stop-gap.
My apologies for 
ignoring 
any mail sent to me today, but I won’t be able to retrieve it until FastMail brings my account back. Please re-send if a message you sent to me today was urgent.
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Geof F. Morris adds this Comment:
Yeah, I’m in the same place. In my case, though, I’ve not moved the mail around, although I certainly could really easily. I’m just not as mission-critical with email as you are, but I certainly understand why it’s a huge issue for you.
October 28th, 2006 at 9:44 pm
Kerim Friedman adds this Comment:
When you initially asked for recommendations about IMAP I mentioned my IMAP provider, Luxsci.com (affiliate link). Since then I’ve been considering switching to Fastmail myself, mostly because it is cheaper and has a nicer GUI. But because I value the reliability and service I get with Luxsci I’ve been holding off.
I’ve been with Luxsci for years and service has never been interrupted. All service questions have been answered within a day, usually within an hour. They keep a backup folder with the last 100 e-mails. I also think they meet all of your requirements.
October 29th, 2006 at 12:29 am
Chris adds this Comment:
I’ve used Fusemail before (demo account) and they seemed to be pretty speedy, and offer good features.
You may want to check out Real Metrics’ page on email providers. They monitor these places and you can get a grasp as to what’s going on with everyone.
I’ve been with Fastmail for 2 years now. They’re “ok” but won’t last long if they keep having outages like this.
Have you thought about Google’s hosted service?
October 29th, 2006 at 10:36 am
Chris adds this Comment:
Forgot to leave my link to Real Metrics…sorry.
October 29th, 2006 at 10:38 am
Anthony Timberlake adds this Comment:
Reminds me of another service that promised to offer something but had similar problems.
October 29th, 2006 at 7:50 pm
Farhan Rehman adds this Comment:
Another option might be to consider using Gmail…
It lets you download all your emails, via pop, whilst maintaining all of them online… I’ve been successfully using it online and offline for a while now…
Just another suggestion for you..
October 31st, 2006 at 11:05 am
Alex adds this Comment:
Gmail doesn’t have IMAP, so it’s out. Tuffmail is at the top of my list right now, but with the new redundant systems at FastMail, I’m probably going to give them one last shot as my primary service while I also set up a back-up service.
November 2nd, 2006 at 1:07 am
Matt Kelly adds this Comment:
Hey Alex,
I am total google fan and I am using Google Apps to host my email.
But your right they don’t have IMAP… yet!
http://www.google.com/a/
I Love GOOGLE!!!
November 6th, 2006 at 12:57 am
Jonathan Greene adds this Comment:
I actually just switched to Google Apps for my domain and currently have quite a bit of mail sitting on Fastmail… trying to figure out what to do with it and how to best get it out.
The Google Mobile application is excellent and while not IMAP will retain state if you connect from a mobile and then your desktop.
http://www.gmail.com/app
I use it on a few Nokia phones…
November 14th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
Pedro adds this Comment:
Jonathan
I forward all my gmail email to my fastmail account. I use fastmail to read and send email back using gmails smtp server.
With this I have
- Gmail spam filter before the messages are forwarded to fastmail
- Gmail archiving and searching. I do not archive in fastmail anymore
- Fastmail web interface and imap interface. I use them both.
- Gmail web interface as a backup in case fastmail is down
It’s been working like this for one year and it is fantastic!
In fact, I have two gmails account. One with the gmail domain and the other is a hosted domain at gmail. Both are forwarded to fastmail.
April 10th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
Redundant E-mail | alexking.org adds this Pingback:
[…] redundant e-mail services a few months ago. Since then, FastMail1 has had some ups and downs with another rough patch and then rolling out their own replicated systems to help avoid future […]
April 18th, 2007 at 11:20 am
Rourke McNamara adds this Comment:
I’m a huge fan of Tuffmail. I’ve been very happy with them.
I’m tracking their uptime using Pingdom and anyone interested can see the results here.
May 30th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
FastMail has been very reliable of late
however I am also sending my mail to TuffMail.
I can’t speak to TuffMail’s reliability since I haven’t had to use them for day-to-day mail yet, but my experience so far is that I’d really miss FastMail’s spam filtering and functionality if I had to fully switch.
May 30th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
sjk adds this Comment:
I’m curious what spam filtering and functionality FastMail offers you that Tuffmail doesn’t, Alex.
If I used webmail then I’d prefer FastMail’s custom client but otherwise Tuffmail has been the superior service (e.g. more reliable/flexible) of the two for my purposes.
June 1st, 2007 at 2:44 am
Alex adds this Comment:
I send the same mail to both FastMail and TuffMail. I get a couple of SPAM messages a day at FM. I clean out my TuffMail account at the end of each month and it normally has around 1000 new SPAM messages each month that didn’t get stuck in the SPAM folder. I’ve read what very little documentation I could find and spent time trying to train it, but it just doesn’t seem to work right.
FastMail’s worked right from day 1. They also have a nice admin interface for setting up lots of functionality beyond SPAM filtering.
June 1st, 2007 at 6:43 am
Jason adds this Comment:
I read everybody’s comments here with great interest. I am trying to find the ideal email solution for the iPhone, one that will give me good webmail, iPhone, and desktop access to the same email store, with good searching and archiving capabilites.
Right now I’m using the Gmail -> Fastmail combo for spam control, archiving, and IMAP. It works OK but I don’t keep a lot of the non-spam emails I receive each day, and deletes from the IMAP desktop/iPhone client can’t be propagated backwards to Gmail.
I guess it would be nice if they had a real GMail client for the iPhone. Sigh. For right now, Fastmail IMAP seems be the way to go for me. I didn’t try TuffMail since I was using Fastmail previously with my Treo (before I switched to Gmail a while back…here again, there again…)
Jason
July 6th, 2007 at 11:16 pm