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Stories like this make me think there would be a market for low-volume, high-security email services. For example, a service that only accepts logins from pre-authorized devices, where any access pattern out of the ordinary is immediately vetted by a human with extensive experience. A sort of concierge email / instant-message / voice-mail service.

Does anyone here point me to such a service?

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Indeed, there's definitely a market for such an email service. Then again who knows how much they'd be willing to pay for it. To have a manned service like that might be difficult to bootstrap.

It would also be difficult to insure. If you're providing any Service Level Agreement, or something where you are taking money and selling based on a quality like security; you are going to fail at some point and get sued as a result; so your upfront costs and pricing structure have to reflect that.

Gmail can be free because it's a free service and you get what you pay for. To provide something of an equivalent service level for money with an additional guarantee of watchdog security services; you'd probably have to start around $10,000 USD per customer/year. And who's going to pay $10K for an email account?

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