Amazon SES account under review or paused: bounce and complaint rate

What it means

AWS monitors the email sent through Amazon SES. When it sees a problem, it either places your account under review or pauses your ability to send. In both cases AWS emails the address linked to your AWS account (which may not be the one you read every day) and opens a case in the AWS Support Center.

• Under review: you can still send, but you have a limited time to fix the problem. If it is not fixed, sending may be paused.
• Paused: sending fails with an "Account is paused" error (SendingPausedException in the API). The console and other operations still work.

The Account dashboard shows the status as Healthy, Under review or Paused.

Why it happens

The most common reasons are the two reputation metrics. At the time of writing, the AWS FAQ gives these values:

• Bounce rate: keep it below 2%. At 5% or more the account is placed under review; at 10% or more sending may be paused. Only hard bounces (addresses that do not exist) to domains you have not verified count.
• Complaint rate: keep it below 0.1%. At 0.1% or more the account is placed under review; at 0.5% or more sending may be paused. It only counts complaints from providers that send feedback to SES. Gmail does not, so Gmail complaints are invisible here.

The rates are not computed over a fixed period but over a "representative volume" of your recent sending, so you cannot recompute them from daily counts. Other reasons include spam trap hits and manual investigations (unsolicited content, phishing, use cases SES does not accept).

Typical root causes: an old or bought list, a form without confirmation that collects typos and fake addresses, test scripts sending to fake addresses, or newsletters sent to people who did not expect them.

How to check

1. Read the email from AWS and the Support Center case: it says which problem was detected.
2. In the SES console, open Reputation metrics (Account dashboard area) to see the current bounce and complaint rates, or the CloudWatch metrics Reputation.BounceRate and Reputation.ComplaintRate.
3. From the CLI: aws sesv2 get-account returns EnforcementStatus, the same value as the Account status in the console.
4. Make sure you receive bounce and complaint notifications (by email or Amazon SNS) and find which campaigns and sources produced them.
5. Send one of your real messages to the unique address on the Delivmail home page. Authentication problems do not change the SES bounce rate, but spam-like content and bad links increase complaints. Also check your domain on /blacklists.

How to fix it

1. Stop the problematic sending if you can. Continuing to send without changes makes it worse.
2. Remove bounced and complaining addresses immediately and automatically. SES can do part of this with the account-level suppression list, described in address on the Amazon SES suppression list, but your own database must also stop sending to them.
3. Clean your list: drop addresses you have not mailed for a long time and contacts who never open. See high bounce rate: clean your mailing list.
4. Fix the way people sign up: confirmation email (double opt-in), CAPTCHA on forms, no fake addresses in tests (use the SES mailbox simulator instead).
5. Reduce complaints: send only what people signed up for, make the sender obvious, add a visible unsubscribe link and a one-click List-Unsubscribe header. More in too many people mark your emails as spam.
6. Never buy, rent or share lists. AWS explicitly lists this as a cause.
7. Reply to the Support Center case. Explain the root cause, the changes you have already made (not future plans), and how they prevent the problem from coming back. For bounces, say how you track them and how you check new addresses.

Check that it is fixed

Watch the Reputation metrics page or a CloudWatch alarm on both rates. AWS answers the case and the status returns to Healthy when the review is lifted; spam trap issues can take three weeks or more to evaluate. Before sending again at full volume, run a new Delivmail test, then send small batches to your most engaged contacts first. No setting guarantees delivery: clean lists and wanted content are what keep the account healthy.