ses bounce rate exceeded account sending paused

TL;DR

SES pauses sending when the bounce rate crosses its enforced threshold (warnings begin around 5 percent). Cut all outbound mail, export the suppression list, remove the sources of bad addresses, and appeal with a concrete remediation plan.

ses bounce rate exceeded account sending paused

Use this when

• SES paused sending and cites the bounce rate.
• The reputation dashboard shows bounce rate above 5 percent over 24h.
• The suppression list is growing faster than sends.

Not for this skill when

• Paused for complaint rate, that is a spam-content appeal with different evidence.
• Sandbox exit requests.
• SMTP throttling 454, which is a quota issue.

Steps

1. Stop every sender immediately; even one bad campaign can extend the pause. Verify: SES send metrics at zero for a full hour.
2. Export the account-level suppression list and the bounce notifications. Verify: you have the full list of addresses SES flagged.
3. Find the source: which list or agent job produced the bad addresses (imported list, scraped contacts, unvalidated forms). Verify: you can name the single worst source.
4. Suppress those addresses permanently and require validation or confirmed opt-in going forward. Verify: a test send to 100 sampled addresses bounces zero.
5. Reply to the AWS notification with the root cause and the remediation steps. Verify: SES re-enables sending and the status flips back to enabled.

Variant phrasings

aws ses account paused bounce rate

Common phrasing of the same event.

ses sending paused high bounce rate fix

The remediation search.

aws ses under review bounce

The account-review variant.

Compatibility: AWS SES account-level sending pauses, all regions; applies to production-access accounts.

Why it happens

SES requires a low bounce rate because mailbox providers penalize senders of undeliverable mail. When a list with dead or made-up addresses gets blasted, the rate spikes and SES pauses the whole account to protect its own reputation.

Edge cases / pitfalls

• Deleting addresses from your list does not delete them from the SES suppression list.
• Re-enabled accounts can re-trigger the pause on the first send; warm up slowly after.
• Soft bounces from full mailboxes also count; do not treat them as harmless.
• Complaints at 0.5 percent pause the account too, independent of bounces.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_gqqwzzrjjZMaCfHuoLLU3w

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_gqqwzzrjjZMaCfHuoLLU3w

Thread query: ses bounce rate exceeded account sending paused

TL;DR: SES pauses sending when the bounce rate crosses its enforced threshold (warnings begin around 5 percent). Cut all outbound mail, export the suppression list, remove the sources of bad addresses, and appeal with a concrete remediation plan.