Amazon suspended my SES account

Amazon SES (BYOS)Updated

If AWS pauses sending on your SES account, EmailFig stops sending and tells you why, but the pause and the appeal are between you and Amazon.

If Amazon pauses sending on your SES account, EmailFig blocks new sends and Settings → AWS shows AWS has paused sending on your SES account. Open your SES console to see why — we can’t lift it for you.

This is between you and AWS. It’s your AWS account, your reputation and Amazon’s decision. We can hold your campaigns safely, but we can’t appeal or escalate it, and we have no visibility into your AWS Support cases.

What happened

Amazon pauses an SES account when its sending threatens Amazon’s infrastructure or breaches the AWS acceptable use policy. In practice that’s almost always:

  • bounce or complaint rates above Amazon’s thresholds, sustained: see Bounce and complaint rates AWS enforces
  • sending to addresses you didn’t collect yourself: bought, scraped, rented or appended lists
  • a billing problem on the AWS account

AWS usually emails the account’s contact address before or when it pauses. That email and your SES console tell you what happened; EmailFig only sees that sending is off.

What to do

  1. Open your SES console in us-east-1 and read the account-level status and reputation figures.
  2. Find the AWS notice in your AWS account’s contact email and your Support cases.
  3. Stop the sending that caused it. Pause automations and unschedule campaigns in EmailFig.
  4. Work out where the addresses came from. If a particular import is behind it, that list is the problem. See Why you shouldn’t send to purchased lists.
  5. Clean up. Hard-bounced addresses are already suppressed. Remove the rest of the list, and consider cleaning inactive contacts.
  6. Reply to AWS with a remediation plan. Say what caused the spike, what you’ve removed, and what you’ve changed. Specifics land better than promises.

Your campaign reports show bounce and complaint rates per send, so you can point AWS at the campaign that caused the spike. See Read a campaign report.

What EmailFig does meanwhile

  • New sends are refused. A send you start by hand answers Can’t send yet: your AWS connection needs attention — see Settings → AWS.
  • A scheduled campaign retries for an hour, then reverts to draft, and we email you. Nothing is lost.
  • Your contacts, templates, automations, forms and reports are untouched. Imports and list building carry on.
  • We email you once when the pause is detected, subject Action needed: your AWS connection is broken.

When AWS lifts it

EmailFig’s next connection health check clears the block within a few hours. To check sooner, open Settings → AWS and click Check again.

An Amazon pause isn’t the same as an EmailFig suspension. If your EmailFig account has been suspended, the AWS page will look fine and the block is ours. See My account was suspended.

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