One minor annoyance with that is that it breaks Gmail's SPF lookups as Rackspace does not do SRS [1] (last time I checked).

[1] http://www.openspf.org/SRS

With, perhaps, the disadvantage that now the NSA can choose the easiest target to mine all your email from - if Google pushes back on a request, they can just go to RackSpace instead.

It's a difficult compromise between availability and security/privacy. I want to be able to get at my mail from all my devices via any Internet connection, but. I still want privacy from dragnet intercept-and-record-everything surveillance.

My current plan - a mail server in the least US influenced jurisdiction I can manage, automatically encrypting all (unencrypted) email to a public key of mine, the forward the encrypted email to a gmail account. I can decrypt mail at the client on my phone/tablet/laptop/desktop, but I lose a lot of mail searchability this way.

Why not set up your own SMTP server that only accepts connections from rackspace. Then forward to aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd:55525.