Should AWS SES bounce emails be notified by one or more methods

Question

AWS Simple Email Service (SES): Bounce Email Notification/Feedback

I have both the following methods set up in the AWS Console to receive information about bounce emails:

1) Email Feedback forwarding - to send any bounce email details back to the sender. This is the domain or email that is managed in the AWS console and is verified. Hence the From/Source is a valid user email with a mailbox

2) SNS Notification for bounce emails - This is used to trigger a lambda function and the intention here is to get a notification on the emails that bounced and was sent from an address of a verified domain that doesn't have a mailbox e.g noreply@domain. This is automated from the software. The lambda function forwards this notification to the reply emails that are part of the Header in the notification.

The reply emails may also contain personal email addresses that are not necessarily managed in the AWS console. Therefore the lambda is basically forwarding the notification back to all the reply emails of the user.

My issue here is that the above works but sometimes I get notifications using both methods.

Should AWS only choose one of the above two when dealing with bounces? Can someone please shed some light on this?

Thank you

Answer 1

Try creating a Deliverability dashboard, it now provides excel sheet to download and track your bounce emails. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/bouncecomplaintdashboard.html

Answer 2

The AWS documentation is not super clear with respect to simultaneously using multiple methods for bounce email notification. However, the following under 'Disabling Email Feedback Forwarding' does indicate that using more than one method for bounce notification will result in multiple notifications. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/notifications-via-email.html

In my case (using the above two methods for bounce email notification), When I use the SES via SMTP interface from an Asp.Net app, I get two bounce email notifications, one via SNS and the other via the Email Feedback Forwarding method. In Addition when I use an email client like MSOutlook, then I only get one bounce notification which is expected because it's not using SES.

My solution:

Option 1: Use both methods for SES.

The Email Feedback Forwarding method will be responsible for delivering the notification to a verified email eg [email protected] with a mailbox.

The lambda triggered by the SNS method will have a filter that will only process notifications where the source is [email protected].

Hence this will prevent duplicates and will also allow me to forward bounce email notifications to other reply-to emails (set by the web app in the header) that are not verified in my AWS.

Option 2: Disable Email Feedback Forwarding Method and process all notifications via lambda triggered by SNS Method.