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.

Considering that they have an open line to Gmail, if you have stuff in Gmail, the NSA isn't going to need to worry about going to Rackspace.

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

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