[Chandler-dev] What email services/ servers should we be testing against?

[Dan Steinicke]

We recently uncovered a problem with Chandler email when using a 
fastmail.fm email account.  That made me wonder what a good mix of email 
accounts to test against would look like.  Doing a quick google I found 
this list of top 10 free email accounts. 

 From this article: (which I have no idea how old or reliable the info is)
http://email.about.com/cs/freeemailreviews/tp/free_email.htm?rd=1

These were listed as the top 10 free email services.  

gmail
inbox.com
fastmail
yahoo
AIM
goowy
MSN
bigstring.com
my way mail
care2 e-mail


There is also the issue of testing against non-free email servers.  From 
this article
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/sysadmin/2007/01/05/fingerprinting-mail-servers.html 
(from O'Reilly recently)

these were listed as the most popular email server software

Sendmail
Postfix
Postini
MS exchange
MXLogic
qmail
Exim
Concentric
Cisco
Barracuda

Testing against this list would seem harder.  Some of these would 
probably get covered by testing against the list of free services above, 
but it might be hard to know which.  Others we might have to setup our 
own servers to test against which probably won't happen with our current 
level of QA and IT resources.

So after my twenty minutes of thought and research into this my choice 
would be to try and set up test accounts on all of the free services 
listed above and do at least some basic testing against them. 

If other people more knowledgeable about email would care to comment on 
this strategy I would be very grateful for your input.

Thanks
Dan