Email Services

I am looking for an email hosting service that satisfies the following criteria, in descending order of importance:

  1. They state how and when they read my email. (Example: “Your incoming mail is read by our spam filter.” Ideally, they’d describe what filters they use, so that I can read up on them and become more educated about how my mail is processed.)
  2. Should the hosting service be forced to cease operations due to financial trouble, they provide at least one week notice so that I can get any messages which remain on their servers into local storage.
  3. Should the hosting provider be coerced by law to reveal my mail to (say) government authorities, executives, or any third party that would normally not be privy to my email, they notify me. (This includes when my account is swept up with many other accounts.)
  4. Reasonable cost, where “reasonable” is less than or equal to 50 USD per year for (say) a gigabyte of storage space and double that amount in bandwidth. I’m willing to pay some more to be left alone.
  5. The hosting provider actively maintains a “canary” for times where warrants issued as part of (3) forbid notification. Such a canary does not directly contravene law, but rather provides an indication that extraordinary circumstances are at hand. (An example.)

Here’s what I’ve tried so far:

TuffMail passes all of these except for (2) and (5). There is also uncertainty with regard to (1): for example, they state “We do not visually examine the contents of Your email unless we have to do so in order to resolve technical problems” — is that technical problems that I report, or any technical problem for any user? Anyway, I’m not too worried about (5) yet, but (2) is a bit disconcerting: in their terms of service, they state that they can shut down whenever they want and that I have no recourse.

Pobox, HushMail and FastMail don’t spell out when they read your email in their privacy policies.

Gmail is right out.

Running my own mail server is a start to solving all of these problems (assuming a non-hacked machine), but I cannot devote the time to do that.

Not using email is, sadly, not an option. Too many people rely on me having an email address.

Ideas?

posted by me | Friday, February 12, 2010 @ 03:29 AM | comment