[Cialug] Email host evaluation

[Claus Niesen]

How do you evaluate if an email provider is OK or not, especially since you don't have access to their servers and practices?

I have apparently some rare requirements, the dash addressing where me-something at domain.com emails go into the me mailbox irregardless of what something is.  Yes, it needs to be a dash. 

So the acceptable mail hosting provider is pretty small.  Two to be correct.  Gandi and Tuffmail.  

Both have some quirks that I found out by accident.  Tuffmail sends incoming mail for me-bitbucket at domain.com to /dev/null (aka the bit bucket).  Didn't know that bitbucket was a "keyword" but their customer support confirmed it.  I guess I can life with that.  With Gandi I can't reply to inquiries for items that I'm selling.  My replies to the anonymized craigslist addresses don't get delivered and I don't receive a bounce email.  I do get a bounced email if I send a mail to an invalid craigslist address.  Had an extensive email exchange with Gandi but they came to the conclusion that it's craigslist fault, even though I can send the replies just fine with Tuffmail's outbound smtp server.  Not something I can life with.  I contacted craigslist but doubt I'll get any help from them.  Besides having mails disappear is concerning.  Could that happen with some other recipient? [rhetorical question]

I'm wondering if Gandi's outbound smtp server being on the CASA CBL, CASA CBLESS, CASA CBLPLUS, and SORBS SPAM black lists.  The first few are Chinese maintained lists so I doubt they are used by craigslist but I guess the last one could.  Tuffmail isn't on any of them.

Gandi: http://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=blacklist%3a217.70.183.196&run=toolpage
Other SMTP I used: http://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=blacklist%3a216.86.168.183&run=toolpage

So with that it's easy to pick between those two but the question remains, should I be comfortable with Tuffmail ?

Tuffmail has been around for quite a while.  Forums pretty much sums up the history of Tuffmail , where Derek acquired Tuffmail in 2010 and since then it is run as stable email hosting environment barely any updates.  Also, the couple of inquiries that I had with Tuffmail was answered by Derek.  The question is, is this good or bad?  I can see it both ways.

Security issues like the SSlv2 are slowly corrected but Tuffmail seems to be always behind.  Although, because of that they didn't get hit with the heartbleed issue. Their current rating is still below par:
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=mail.mxes.net

Do surface checks like this SSL analyzer really allow to get a good picture of an email provider?  What is your thoughts of Tuffmail and the way Gandi is handling things?  


  Claus
(who used to run his own email server and hopes not to do that again)