How to set up a second email address

Hi

I use Fastmail to allow my clients to send wage slips to their employees in my payroll program. Currently it is down: http://www.fastmailstatus.com/ So I suppose I should set up another email provider to forward these emails if/when Fastmail fails. So how can I tell if Fastmail is down? I do get an error after 10 seconds, 1429 OLE IDespatch exception code 0 from?

Any thoughts/code much appreciated, who else to use?