On django 4.2.1 with django-ses 3.4.1, calling Django's sendmail raised: An error occurred (InvalidClientTokenId) when calling the GetSendQuota operation: The security token included in the request is invalid. Enabling USESES_V2 = True changed the error to: An error occurred (UnrecognizedClientException) when calling the GetAccount operation. The same AWS keys worked fine via aws-cli and raw boto3 in the same codebase, so the credentials themselves were valid and the failure was specific to how django-ses called the SES API.