How to Monitor AWS SES Delivery Rates and Bounce Metrics

If you are sending email through Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), monitoring your delivery rates and bounce metrics is not optional. AWS enforces strict thresholds on bounce and complaint rates. Once your bounce rate crosses 5% or your complaint rate crosses 0.1%, your account can be placed under review or have sending paused entirely. This guide explains exactly how to monitor AWS SES, which metrics matter most, and the tools you can use to stay ahead of problems.

Why AWS SES Monitoring Matters

AWS SES is a bare-bones email service compared to all-in-one providers like SendGrid or Mailgun. It does not have a built-in dashboard that surfaces real-time deliverability health in one view. Left unmonitored, a sudden spike in hard bounces or spam complaints can go unnoticed until AWS suspends your sending account.

Common scenarios that silently degrade your list quality:

• Work emails that become invalid when an employee leaves a company
• Users signing up with typos or disposable addresses (hard bounces)
• Unclear unsubscribe flows that lead recipients to hit the spam button instead (complaints)
• Expired aliases or cancelled email subscriptions

According to AWS documentation, SES actively tracks bounce and complaint rates and may place your account under review if these rates are too high. Monitoring proactively is the only way to act before this happens.

Core AWS SES Metrics You Must Track

SES produces several event types. Not all carry the same risk weight. Here are the ones that matter most for account health and deliverability:

Hard bounces occur when an email address does not exist, the domain does not exist, or the receiving server permanently rejects delivery. Soft bounces are temporary failures. AWS SES retries soft bounces automatically, but persistent soft bounces should eventually be treated the same as hard bounces. 

Method 1: Using the SES Reputation Metrics Console

The quickest way to check account health is the Reputation Metrics page inside the Amazon SES console. This dashboard shows the same information the AWS SES team uses when assessing individual account health.

How to Access It

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon SES console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ses/
2. In the left navigation pane, choose Reputation metrics.
3. Review Account Status, Bounce Rate, and Complaint Rate.

The Account Status field summarises combined account health and can display one of five states:

• Healthy: No issues are impacting your account.
• Under Review: AWS has flagged bounce or complaint issues and is monitoring the account.
• Pending End of Review Decision: A manual review is in progress before further action.
• Sending Paused: AWS has paused sending. You must request a review to restore access.
• Pending Sending Pause: Issues are unresolved and a sending pause is imminent.

The Reputation Metrics page can also surface information about spamtrap hits and other reputation signals unrelated to direct bounces or complaints. This makes it a valuable first stop when diagnosing sudden deliverability drops.

Method 2: Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM)

The Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM) is AWS’s most comprehensive built-in deliverability monitoring tool. It tracks the complete journey of an email: from send to delivery, bounce, complaint, open, and click. VDM now also includes inbox placement metrics and blocklist monitoring, features launched by AWS in May 2026.

What VDM Now Includes

• Delivery rates, bounce rates (hard and soft), complaint rates, open rates, and click rates in a unified view.
• Inbox placement rate: the percentage of messages that land in the inbox versus the spam folder, based on industry sample data per sending domain and campaign.
• Proactive inbox placement testing: test candidate email content against top mailbox providers before sending.
• Blocklist monitoring: passive awareness of when your sending domains or IPs appear on public email blocklists.

How to Enable VDM

• In the SES console, go to Account dashboard.
• Under Virtual Deliverability Manager, choose Enable.
• Once enabled, the VDM dashboard is available under Deliverability in the left navigation pane.

Method 3: Configuration Sets and Event Publishing

Configuration sets are the foundation of any custom aws ses monitoring pipeline. They let you define which email events (send, delivery, bounce, complaint, open, click, reject, rendering failure) are captured and where they are sent.

Supported Event Destinations

• Amazon CloudWatch: Store metrics for alerting and dashboards.
• Amazon SNS: Push real-time bounce and complaint notifications to queues or Lambda functions.
• Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose: Stream events to Amazon S3, Redshift, or OpenSearch for long-term storage and analysis.
• Amazon Pinpoint: Use for engagement analytics on marketing campaigns.

Creating a Configuration Set (AWS Console)

• In the SES console, choose Configuration sets from the left menu.
• Click Create set and give it a descriptive name (e.g., transactional-emails).
• Under Event destinations, choose Add destination.
• Select the event types to track (Bounces, Complaints, Deliveries are the minimum).
• Choose your destination type (CloudWatch, SNS, or Kinesis Firehose) and complete the setup.
• Associate the configuration set with your sending identity by adding it to your SendEmail API calls or SMTP headers.

Method 4: Setting Up CloudWatch Alarms for SES

CloudWatch Alarms let you define thresholds and receive notifications via email, SMS, or PagerDuty before you breach the limits that trigger AWS account action. This is the recommended approach for proactive aws ses monitoring.

Key Metrics to Alarm On

Creating a Bounce Rate Alarm in CloudWatch

• In the CloudWatch console, choose Alarms, then Create alarm.
• Click Select metric, navigate to SES, and select Reputation.BounceRate.
• Set the threshold: alert when BounceRate >= 0.02 (2%) for 1 datapoint out of 1 period.
• Under Notification, choose or create an SNS topic and add your alert email address.
• Name the alarm (e.g., SES-BounceRate-Warning) and create it.

Method 5: Real-Time Bounce and Complaint Handling via SNS

SNS notifications give you real-time visibility into delivery failures. The standard architecture routes SES events to SNS topics, then to an SQS queue, and finally to a Lambda function that stores or acts on the data. Here is the minimum viable setup using the AWS CLI:

Step 1: Create SNS Topics

aws sns create-topic --name ses-bouncesaws sns create-topic --name ses-complaintsaws sns create-topic --name ses-deliveries

aws sns create-topic --name ses-bouncesaws sns create-topic --name ses-complaintsaws sns create-topic --name ses-deliveries

Step 2: Connect SNS Topics to Your SES Identity

aws ses set-identity-notification-topic \  --identity yourdomain.com \  --notification-type Bounce \  --sns-topic arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:123456789:ses-bouncesaws ses set-identity-notification-topic \  --identity yourdomain.com \  --notification-type Complaint \  --sns-topic arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:123456789:ses-complaints

aws ses set-identity-notification-topic \  --identity yourdomain.com \  --notification-type Bounce \  --sns-topic arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:123456789:ses-bouncesaws ses set-identity-notification-topic \  --identity yourdomain.com \  --notification-type Complaint \  --sns-topic arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:123456789:ses-complaints

Once SNS notifications are confirmed working, disable the default email feedback forwarding to avoid duplicate notifications. 

Domain-Level Monitoring with CloudWatch

When you operate multiple sending domains from a single SES account (for example, one domain for transactional email and another for marketing), account-level metrics are not granular enough. A single high-bounce campaign can affect the reputation of all domains on the account.

The solution is to use SES message auto-tags to publish domain-level delivery events to CloudWatch as custom metrics. By tagging sends with the source domain, you can create separate CloudWatch dashboards per domain and set independent alarms. This approach is detailed in the AWS Messaging Blog.

For multi-domain setups, the recommended architecture is:

• Create one configuration set per sending domain.
• Route each configuration set to its own CloudWatch event destination.
• Use CloudWatch metric filters to build per-domain dashboards and alarms.
• Use VDM for the aggregated view across all domains.

Best Practices for AWS SES Monitoring and Deliverability

Conclusion

AWS SES monitoring is a multi-layer problem. The Reputation Metrics console and VDM give you quick visibility into account health. Configuration sets with CloudWatch event destinations give you the granular, time-series data you need for alerting. SNS notifications let you process bounces and complaints in real time and automatically update your suppression lists. Third-party tools like Datadog and Prometheus reduce the operational overhead of maintaining these pipelines.

The most important takeaway is to set your alarms well before AWS thresholds, act on every hard bounce, and make list hygiene a default part of your sending workflow. A clean list does not just protect your SES account, it improves deliverability for every email you send.

DisclaimerThis article is intended for informational purposes only. AWS SES thresholds, console layouts, and service features may change over time. Always refer to the official Amazon SES documentation for the most current guidance. Third-party tool integrations mentioned are based on publicly available information and do not constitute an endorsement by CubeAPM or its affiliates.

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