Or $19/month get a Mailgun.net account (also run by Rackspace) and use it as a redirection service into individual free gmail (or google apps) accounts.
I do the same thing for free with my domain registration company and then pop all my messages off gmail using fetchmail for good measure. I then send through an external smtp server. All the fun of gmail, no reliance on Google. I actually also tried to pay them before setting that all up and they couldn't sort it out.
