Amazon SES Bounces

5
votes

I've tried SO many approaches to this problem, wasted a whole week, without resolution.

I have two AWS accounts. One account has example.com sending SES email via SMTP. The raw mime file includes Source: [email protected]. The second account has the bouncehandler.com domain, which uses an inbound rule set to pipe the bounce to a Lambda function.

From everything I have read, passing the Source: while sending via SMTP through example.com (account 1) email, the SES Return Path will eventually hit the Source.

I include real email addresses in these campaign tests, and they are received properly in Gmail, etc., but the emails sent to SES bounce simulator or other simulators are not hitting the email specified in Source header.

Why is SES swallowing the bounces without sending them anywhere? The documentation specifically states that if a domain (example.com) does not include any SNS topics and if it disables email feedback forwarding, SES will send it to the Source address. It's simply not doing that.

Note: I can send directly to the [email protected] address, and Lambda will handle it immediately (per CloudWatch logs), so the issue is with SES respecting the Source header.

1
amazon-web-servicesamazon-ses

1 Answers

0
votes

Do you have "MAIL FROM" domain set? If yes, it's the feedback destination for SMTP sent emails. Taking it is always set to a subdomain, you obviously just don't have rules for corresponding addresses to get your notifications. I'd also advice adding both your domains to both SPF records along with amazonses.com not to mess with dmarc policies.

If no - you probably face your problem due to automated Return Path anonymization.

Here it is