(I'm a new member, so I'm not positive this is the best forum/category for my question, If it belongs elsewhere, I'd appreciate the feedback. ;-)

I am looking for a reliable & ethical commercial email provider to replace my free and oh-so-convenient (but black box) GMail accounts.  I have had important mail (even a email of intent for a job offer!) inexplicably become marked as spam on the gmail server so that my Thunderbird mail client didn't see it and so it didn't download to my PC.  This and other examples have led me to believe the issue is either Google incompetence or external tampering (the latter is a more-than-reasonable likelihood in my case).

Regardless, I would like to dump GMail while avoiding the random crapshoot of picking another email provider simply because they are returned by a search list or because I like their name. 

I don't care if the new provider is big or small, but I do want some confidence they will still be in business in the foreseeable future since I am an independent software contractor and rely on email contact for jobs.  I also don't want to face downtime or server-busy problems connecting and transferring mail.  And finally, regarding the ethical part, I would like to know that I could request a historical list of all my incoming and outgoing messages handled by their server(s) in order to compare with my client's incoming and outgoing messages, to ensure what I think was sent really was and that what I didn't get really wasn't received .... no more GMail's black holes ...

Thanks in advance.

Sigh, no web page, no web server, just me & my laptop traveling from job to job.  Since I never know where I'll be even on 1 given contract (over the past half-year here in Philly I've probably stayed in at least a 6 different places while working on the same job).   I rely on a Verizon PCI wireless modem, which is not the speediest little devil but connectivity is nearly always OK <except for that short stint in Michigan when the only reliable connection was that one spot at the picnic table in the back yard of a house where I was staying ;->

At one time I had Linux set up on an external USB hard drive, but I'm not sure I still know where that drive is ....

One thing to consider if you're using a hosting company to run your email server is that you may eat up all of your allocated bandwidth filtering spam, particularly if you have a widely publicized email address. Some hosting companies really crank up the price per mb after you go over your limit for the month.