Better by design.

We think about how email should be and try to make it happen. Email should be lightening fast and working all the time, shouldn't it? We have a unique system which guarantees this.

How most other ISP's handle mail
The vast majority of ISP's and hosting providers use a bog standard mail program which backs up its files overnight. If there's a problem they restore the backup, right? Wrong, well, kind of wrong. Because we're talking literally millions and millions of files, this restore procedure can take hours or even days to perform and that's the problem. That's why you hear horror stories of ISP's mail systems being completely unuseable for prolonged periods - it's something virtually all ISP's have to deal with. Of course all decent providers ensure they have RAID hard drives (two hard drives mirroring each other in case of hard drive failure), but that doesn't protect you against a whole server failure or link failure. Although the Data centres ISP's use usually have power protection (normally a few hours power at most), fire suppressant and security. There's so many possible points of failure in traditional setups.

Live mail system mirroring
A perfect solution would be a live clone of the mail system, copying everything the other does with precision. It's so difficult to do because of the volume of files and transactions taking place - that's why there is virtually no mail systems out there that can do this, certainly none we know of. With MacAce everything is duplicated in real time....

An email comes into our primary server, processed (spam etc) and sent to your folder on the system ready for you to collect. It then sends that email to our secondary network in Manchester which is an exact copy of itself.

If our primary system goes down for any reason, everything reverts to our secondary whilst we fix things. All inbound email instantly goes there and you collecting and sending email reroutes within a few minutes. Once we fix whatever the problem was, both systems synchronise perfectly. There's no real speed loss either, Our secondary network has similar multiple 100Mbit fast links to the internet, as well as a dedicated link to our London network.

The clever part is that if our mail system is busy, both will work together is duo-synchrony to ensure speed and efficiency are preserved. Both systems perform thousands of transactions and commands per second between them, 250 miles apart, on both incoming and outgoing mail.

No SPAM!
We also have a unique system for identifying and blocking spam which works with other ISP all over the world to attempt to ensure you don't receive any spam at all AND you get all of your real mail. It's not an afterthought, it's at the very core of our mail system.