Bounce and complaint rates AWS enforces
Amazon watches your own SES account's bounce and complaint rates and will pause it if they stay too high.
On BYOS, Amazon watches your SES account. It tracks your bounce rate and complaint rate over a rolling window and puts the account under review, then eventually pauses it, when they stay too high. Amazon’s published levels are 5% bounces and 0.1% complaints: one dead address in twenty, or one complaint in a thousand.
These are AWS’s limits on your account, separate from EmailFig’s own checks. Meeting ours doesn’t exempt you from Amazon’s.
Where to read them
- In your AWS console. Your SES account page in us-east-1 shows the reputation figures Amazon is judging you on, and whether the account is healthy, under review or paused.
- In EmailFig. Every campaign report carries a bounce rate and a complaint rate, and your dashboard badge tracks a rolling 30-day window that turns amber at the same 5% and 0.1% levels, so it warns you before Amazon does. See Your deliverability health badge and Metrics defined.
The two don’t have to agree exactly. Amazon measures everything your SES account sends; EmailFig measures what it sent for you. A campaign report’s bounce rate also includes soft bounces, while Amazon’s figure is about permanent failures.
What counts
- Bounces. A hard bounce is a permanent rejection (the mailbox or domain doesn’t exist) and is what damages you. A soft bounce is temporary, and Amazon doesn’t treat it the same way. See Soft bounces vs hard bounces.
- Complaints. Someone pressed “report spam” at a provider that shares that signal with Amazon. They’re rarer and count for far more: the threshold is fifty times tighter than the bounce one.
What EmailFig already does for you
Every campaign you send:
- suppresses hard-bounced addresses. Marked cleaned, blocked from future sends, and re-importing doesn’t bring them back.
- cleans repeat soft bouncers. Three soft bounces for the same contact within 30 days and the contact is cleaned too.
- unsubscribes and suppresses complainers the moment the complaint arrives.
- carries a one-click unsubscribe header. See Meet Gmail and Yahoo bulk sender requirements.
- refuses lists that don’t meet the import quality bar. See This list doesn’t meet our import quality bar.
On BYOS these suppressions are scoped to your own account. Your reputation is entirely your own to protect.
Keeping the numbers down
- Never send to a list you didn’t collect. See Why you shouldn’t send to purchased lists.
- Use double opt-in on public signup forms. See Set up double opt-in on a list.
- Warm up a brand-new domain. See Warm up a new sending domain.
- Send regularly, and prune the unengaged. See Clean your list of inactive contacts.
- Watch the first send to a new list, and stop if the bounce rate looks wrong.
If Amazon acts
An account under review still sends. A paused account doesn’t, and EmailFig blocks sending too. See Amazon suspended my SES account.