That sounds like a sticky situation. I don't think it's a matter of trust, but just a matter of principle for me. He can be the most trustworthy guy ever, it st

That sounds like a sticky situation. I don't think it's a matter of trust, but just a matter of principle for me. He can be the most trustworthy guy ever, it still doesn't mean it's a good idea to give him ssh access to your business. That should be sacred. Because of the fact that they are requesting ssh access, I would try to migrate to another mailing list service, probably something hosted like Mandrill or SendGrid. I realize that is probably much easier said than done for you guys, but I think it's necessary in the long run. In the meanwhile, I guess you can mitigate risk by making strict permissions for the user they ssh in with. Are they usually manipulating data on the production server, or changing code? If it's just code, you can give them access to a development server and push code to production by yourself after you've done a review.