While running in sandbox mode you can only send to verified users - once your account has been activated, you can send to anyone.
Getting out of the sandbox:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/request-production-access.html
These are the restrictions in SES sandbox :
You can only send mail to the Amazon SES mailbox simulator and to verified email addresses and domains. You can only send mail from verified email addresses and domains. You can send a maximum of 200 messages per 24-hour period. Amazon SES can accept a maximum of one message from your account per second.
You have to move out of sandbox to send email to non-verified email address using AWS SES.
By default you can only send to email addresses that have been verified in your SES account. As others have said, this is called "sandbox mode". This is to prevent spam.
To enable "production mode", where you can send emails to non-verified email addresses, you need to request this manually through a support ticket, which will also be examined manually by an AWS employee. This is all explained clearly in the same link that the top answer gave back in 2016 but I've also preserved the 7-step instructions (just in case the link changes or can't be opened for some reason):
- In the account details modal, fill out the following account details.
For Enable production access, choose Yes or No. You can only move out of the sandbox by choosing Yes.
For Mail Type, choose the type of email that you plan to send. If more than one value applies, choose the option that applies to the majority of the email that you plan to send.
For Website URL, enter the URL of your website. Providing this information helps us better understand the type of content that you plan to send.
For Use case description, explain how you plan to use Amazon SES to send email. To help us process your request, you should answer the following questions:
How do you plan to build or acquire your mailing list?
How do you plan to handle bounces and complaints?
How can recipients opt out of receiving email from you?
How did you choose the sending rate or sending quota that you specified in this request?
For Additional contact addresses, tell us where you want to receive communications about your account. This can be a comma-separated list of up to 4 email addresses.
For Preferred contact language, choose whether you want to receive communications for this case in English or Japanese.
When you finish, choose Submit for review.
If you are successful, you will get an email from [email protected] saying:
Hello,
Thank you for submitting your request to increase your sending limits. Your new sending quota is 50,000 messages per day. Your maximum send rate is now 14 messages per second. We have also moved your account out of the Amazon SES sandbox.
This takes effect immediately in the XXXX region. You can view the current sending rate and sending quota for your account on the Sending Statistics page of the Amazon SES console, or by using the GetSendQuota API.
If unsuccessful, you will get an email saying the following:
Thank you for providing us with additional information about your Amazon SES account in the Europe (London) region. We reviewed this information, but we are still unable to grant your request.
We made this decision because we believe that your use case would impact the deliverability of our service.
We cannot assist you further with this issue, and we will not respond to additional messages on this subject.
The SES forum is full of frustrated people who got the second message (indicated an unsuccessful application to send emails to non-verified email addresses), but I can assure that that this morning I got the first message (indicating a successful application to exit the sandbox and enter production mode where I can send to non-verified email addresses).
The forums indicate that this can be very hit-or-miss, depending on which staff members reads your application (people have pointed out that they have had some accounts approved with barely any description, and other accounts not approved despite giving what they felt were sufficient details). Therefore I'd advise you to be thorough during this application.
After you move out from sandbox mode, you need to handle complains and bounds about SES. AWS asking us ,you are sending a mail to an unregistered mail adress.what if mail adress doesn't exist? .AWS needs notificate you about the sending status of mail which you sent. There are three sending status : complaints,bounds(mandatory),deliver(optional) So you can get a notification about the mail if it sent or not with the reason. To handle complaints and bounds,you need to create SNS topics and need to relate them with the SES.now AWS can notificate you about the mail it is sent or failed or something else..
Here is the detailed description how to relate SNS and SES :
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/en_us/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/configure-sns-notifications.html
