I third the motion regarding Fastmail. They have recently been acquired by Opera.com but that's not a negative IMO. Google apps was easier when it came along for setting up domain email but I've had excellent history with Fastmail.

Yearly plans give you the extras you'd want and are around $35/yr

If it's important it might be worth paying for. Fastmail is $40/year for the full fledged personal plan w/ your own domain etc etc. The filtering support is better than Gmail and if you want to write your own Sieve rules you can get very specific about it. Happy customer of about seven years.

Marco Arment blogged about his switch here: http://www.marco.org/2011/04/05/let-us-pay-for-this-service-...

Cmd-F "fastmail"

I've been using them for a few months now, definitely worth the price. Really quick and easy to add new virtual domains, and the spam filter is decent enough for my inbox. Highly recommended.

I second the motion. I've used fastmail for years. It's been utterly dependable, worth every penny. I moved to them after deciding that running my own imap server was just too much hassle.

Discussion about fastmail.fm/OperaMail on Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2427102

The new beta web interface for fastmail.fm looks pretty good: https://beta.fastmail.fm

I've used Fastmail for a couple of years, after I decided to leave gmail. Very happy with it - it's the only web service I pay for.

i, too, used fastmail for years. these days i do everything through gmail, which i switched to because i needed the larger quota it provided and had no money at the time to pay fastmail for it. Fastmail offers a free 'guest' account, which is what I had, and should totally suffice to give you an idea of the service, which I would definitely recommend.