Streching the limits are you? Additional interesting questions would be: AC or DC current, what kind of load and how high is the voltage on the contact if the relay is deactivated? Why is this interesting to know? inductive loads stress the contacts when opening, capacitive loads stress the contacts when closing. As all contacts bounce there is a lot of dissipation during the bounching. If the voltage is higher the contacts burn-up faster. DC is more worse than AC (arcing is difficult to stop with DC).
'Throwing' vendors out is not nice, especially when you use their component out of spec :-)
In any case you suggestion is very good. I like to perform a lifetest on a relay because the specification is not always clear. When you switch capacitive and inductive loads you can get stress on the contacts due to the current and voltage spikes. Try to find this in the specification! There is some standardization in relays (TV-5, TV-8) which tells sometimes about inrush current capabilities, but it is always best to do switch on/off cycles. I have seen several occasions in the past were such a test would had filtered out a design problem.
