Email is not something to get too upset about, until you lose one to downtime by your provider of choice. And then you realise that it is too important to be left to free services, or even a domain hoster.
I use a hoster called Hostway, and they went spectacularly down last week. (This despite the fact, or perhaps because of it, that Hostway launched a new service recently offering 150 GB of space for $10 a month.) It was only about a day, but several domains I based there lost email access when their storage failed. Now I have no idea who might have been trying to reach me and couldn’t because of bounced emails, what newsletters I’ve been removed from because of bounced emails, what email newsletters I may have missed
Now this kind of thing happens, but it made me realise that losing one email is the same as losing all of them if you don’t know which email it is, since it may be the important one you’ve been waiting for offering you money/marriage/a new nose. Email is different to hosting a website: a website can go down, and you’ll lose some traffic, but it will come back up again. Email is a stream of discrete bits of information, and there’s no way of telling whether there are any missing.
In short, a good hoster needs to guarantee that, should something go wrong, no email is left behind. Hostway have not, so far not been able to assure me of that. They say that emails lost during the outage have been recovered, but as far as I can work out that does not refer to those lost because of the outage — in other words, those emails that were stored on their servers and not recovered by users before the outage hit. (Emails to their technical staff about this were responded to with pasted notifications from their support team, which didn’t address this issue.
This surprises me, but shouldn’t. They are listed by Netcraft as the second most reliable hoster last month and I’ve not had many problems with them. But they are a domain hoster, which means that bullet-proof email is not top of their priorities. As Syd Low of AlienCamel puts it (declaration of interest: I’ve been using Syd’s email service the past few years, and it’s rock solid), there are three types of email service: bundling services (like Hostway), free services (like Gmail) and paid services (like AlienCamel) which provide Web access, lots of redundant backups to make sure no email goes missing, plus anti-spam, anti-virus and anti-phishing features.
My lesson from all this: email is too important to entrust to people who don’t take it seriously, or who aren’t getting money for your business. Of course, no one wants to pay for something they’re getting for free, or more cheaply, but sometimes free and cheap is not enough.
