Something that I recommend to people who need to keep in contact with other people and who have periodic e-mail server problems is to get a backup address on one of the free servers such as Hotmail. Then if people need to reach you and your primary address is not working they can contact you through that one. Quite often those servers will let you activate a "vacation" setting which instructs the server to automatically forward your mail to your regular address. So you never have to check the backup one except when your main one is having problems.