Gmail.com was down (mail.google.com)

Or you could go for a paid service without the ads. And we don't sell your data :)

  http://fastmail.fm

/bias

I tried outlook.com for a while after the launch, but I just can't go back to the folder system. Tag & archive is now a requirement for any future email service I'll use.

she just announced it :)

I assume it happens by lack of design.

How well would glusterfs work across the Internet? Doing local HA with some kind of SAN seems fine, but the thing I'm trying to solve is "entire datacenter goes down, make the user have no more pain than making a new imap connection". It seems like something that would really need to be handled inside IMAP (using some crazy backing store for mail, like a database) to be done well, but maybe filesystem level replication with maildir would be enough.

I like it, for my next hosting company: We don't have downtime, just unscheduled maintenance.

"I meant to do that!"

  "One must require from each one the duty which each one can perform," the king
  went on. "Accepted authority rests first of all on reason. If you ordered your people
  to go and throw themselves into the sea, they would rise up in revolution. I have the
  right to require obedience because my orders are reasonable."

  "Then my sunset?" the little prince reminded him: for he never forgot a question once
  he had asked it.

  "You shall have your sunset. I shall command it. But, according to my science of 
  government, I shall wait until conditions are favorable."

  "When will that be?" inquired the little prince.

  "Hum! Hum!" replied the king; and before saying anything else he consulted a bulky
  almanac. "Hum! Hum! That will be about--about--that will be this evening about twenty
  minutes to eight. And you will see how well I am obeyed!"

http://www.angelfire.com/hi/littleprince/framechapter10.html

Hardware breakages and Zero-Day exploits usually tend to show up at most inconvenient times. I'd recommend everybody to not own an email server from a pure business perspective, unless you're a mail server admin anyways. There's so much time you can sink in it and still not achieve the level of security and uptime a quality email host will reach for much less money.

Now, there are arguments to run your own mailserver - you get to configure it exactly the way you want, you might see it as a hobby, ... But from a pure financial point of view it doesn't make sense.

I know what he meant, but it's not like google is improvising with gmail. The site is already up by the way, it's been years since they have a more than 5 minute downtime. Also, you can never dream of having the same kind of redundancy as gmail will have nor the collective man hours spent in the project. I don't hate the idea of self hosting your mail, I just think it's ridiculous to say you'll have a better service than gmail when you have much better arguments like privacy, control and ownership.

Pay for servers from someone other than GoDaddy--almost anyone else, really. Home servers are a really bad solution for anything remotely important, but shared hosting from the likes of Dreamhost, VPS from a company like Linode, or EC2 instances from Amazon are all fast, reliable, and cheap.

So you're telling me that in 11 years, your server has never been down, even for a reboot, software update or hardware failure?

Going on 11 years here with no real issues.

Define "no real issues" cos I would define GMail going down for some users in parts of the world for a short period of time as "no real issue".