Amazon SES Best Practices

When using Amazon SES for email delivery, complaints can be far more damaging to your sender reputation than bounces. While Amazon has strict bounce rate thresholds, their complaint threshold is even stricter—and breaking it can lead to immediate sending restrictions or suspension. This guide will show you how to effectively monitor and manage complaints with Amazon SES, and how Bauns provides the visibility you need to protect your account.

The Critical Amazon SES Complaint Threshold

Complaints occur when recipients mark your email as spam or report it as unwanted. These actions trigger feedback loops (FBLs) between email providers and Amazon SES. To maintain good standing with Amazon SES, you need to:

• Track all complaint notifications in real-time
• Identify patterns and problematic message types
• Maintain complaint rates well below the 0.1% threshold
• Immediately remove complainers from your sending lists

The Visibility Challenge with Amazon SES

While Amazon SES sends complaint notifications through Amazon SNS, the platform lacks native tools for:

• Visualizing complaint trends over time
• Tracking complaint rates by campaign or message type
• Alerting you when complaint rates approach the critical threshold
• Providing detailed complaint data for analysis

This visibility gap makes it difficult to proactively manage complaint rates and often leads to account suspension before issues can be identified and addressed.

How Bauns Transforms SES Complaint Monitoring

Bauns fills this critical gap by providing comprehensive complaint monitoring through a direct integration with Amazon SES via SNS:

The Technical Architecture: How Bauns Captures Complaint Data

Bauns works by creating a direct pipeline for SES complaint data:

1. Email recipient marks message as spam
2. Email provider sends complaint via Feedback Loop to Amazon SES
3. Amazon SES generates a complaint notification and publishes to SNS
4. SNS forwards the notification to Bauns' HTTP endpoint
5. Bauns processes the JSON notification data in real-time
6. The complaint appears instantly in your Bauns dashboard
                    

This architecture ensures you never miss a complaint notification and can take immediate action to address issues before they impact your account status.

Example of an SES Complaint Notification

Here's what an actual complaint notification from Amazon SES looks like in JSON format:

{
  "notificationType": "Complaint",
  "complaint": {
    "complainedRecipients": [
      {
        "emailAddress": "recipient@example.com"
      }
    ],
    "timestamp": "2023-01-01T00:00:00.000Z",
    "feedbackId": "0100017295007fb0-00e7ce87-7a13-4751-8394-a28c5bf8c8db-000000",
    "userAgent": "ExampleMail/1.0",
    "complaintFeedbackType": "abuse",
    "arrivalDate": "2023-01-01T00:00:00.000Z"
  },
  "mail": {
    "timestamp": "2023-01-01T00:00:00.000Z",
    "messageId": "0100017295005de1-3d9375ef-12a1-4616-a825-d8e9a1880d16-000000",
    "source": "sender@yourdomain.com",
    "sourceArn": "arn:aws:ses:us-west-2:123456789012:identity/yourdomain.com",
    "sendingAccountId": "123456789012",
    "destination": ["recipient@example.com"]
  }
}
                    

Bauns parses this JSON data, extracts the relevant information, and presents it in an easy-to-understand dashboard that highlights the most important details.

Maximizing the Value of Complaint Data with Bauns

1. Set Up Custom Alert Thresholds

With Bauns, you can create proactive alert thresholds that warn you long before you approach Amazon's 0.1% limit:

• Set initial warning alerts at 0.05% (half of Amazon's threshold)
• Create urgent alerts at 0.08% to trigger immediate action
• Configure alerts by project, campaign, or overall account

2. Analyze Complaint Patterns

Bauns provides detailed analytics to help you understand what triggers complaints:

• Track complaint rates by message type, subject line, or content patterns
• Identify which recipient domains generate more complaints
• Analyze time-based patterns (day of week, time of day) that affect complaint rates

This granular data helps you refine your email strategy to minimize complaints and maximize deliverability.

3. Maintain Centralized Suppression Lists

One of the most valuable features of Bauns is its automatic complaint suppression list:

• Every complaint is automatically added to your suppression database
• Export suppression lists in multiple formats (CSV, JSON, API) for integration with your sending systems
• View detailed records of when and why addresses were added to the suppression list

Real-World Success Story: Preventing Account Suspension

Here's how one company used Bauns to identify and resolve a potentially devastating complaint issue:

Without Bauns' real-time complaint monitoring, this company would likely have exceeded Amazon's threshold and faced a potential account suspension.

Conclusion: Complaint Visibility is Essential for SES Success

While Amazon SES offers excellent value for email delivery, its native tools don't provide the visibility needed to effectively manage complaint rates. Bauns bridges this gap by:

• Creating a direct pipeline for real-time complaint data via SNS
• Providing comprehensive dashboards and analytics
• Alerting you before complaint rates become problematic
• Helping you identify and address the root causes of complaints

By implementing Bauns as your SES monitoring solution, you gain the visibility and tools needed to maintain healthy complaint rates, protect your sender reputation, and prevent the devastating impact of an account suspension.