E-mail should be like Electrical or Gas Service

I have had a horrible experience with my e-mail vendor. Yes, you might ask why I am not using Google or something but I am not and it is mostly a historical thing. Anyway, they decided to migrate to a new mail server architecture. This apparently justified essentially screwing up everyone's e-mail for a week or so: first flaky and then dead altogether and a slow recovery. If they were shooting for five-nines then they will need to be failure free into the next millennium in my opinion. Anyway, to make things worse, during this "planned outage" e-mails from the same provider were not being delivered about the fact that one of my domain names is about to expire. Now I know that I am certainly to blame for not renewing early and all of that but the consequences of my failure were dramatic: they shut down my site, tossed the domain forwarding information, and started sending undeliverable bounces back to whomever was trying to send me e-mail, meaning, of course, that I would not get that e-mail. It took me a bit of time to figure out that this was not another symptom of the "planned outage." To make things worse, they charged me a $25 reinstatement fee. I will be changing providers for that simple injustice.

What is the point of this rant? It seems to me that E-mail is as vital in our modern age as electricity and gas and the providers should view it as such in all of its ramifications.

Firstly, and most obviously, it should be utterly reliable and when it fails there should be a darn good reason. For example, our electricity occasionally goes out and it is usually essentially always an act of nature - a powerful windstorm or an avalanche or ice in the mountains where the power lines bring hydro power to Seattle. I have never in my life experienced a "planned outage."

Secondly, when a customer screws up they you don't just rip up their environment - you give them grace time. I have screwed up more then once and have failed to pay my gas bill and the gas company sends ominous warnings but acts slowly to turn off the gas. This is as it should be - people screw up and the consequences of a single screw up should be small, not catastrophic.