How can I use the reputation dashboard to find out when my Amazon SES bounce rate is high?

Resolution

You can open the reputation dashboard to review your bounce or complaint rate. However, the dashboard doesn't send you notifications when the bounce or complaint rate reaches a certain threshold.

To get notifications for a bounce or complaint rate threshold, set up an Amazon CloudWatch alarm with an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. You can set the CloudWatch alarm to notify the SNS topic whenever your bounce or complaint rate reaches a threshold that you specify. Then, the SNS topic sends a notification to the endpoint (such as an email address) that you subscribed to the topic. For instructions on setting up this notification system, see Creating Reputation Monitoring Alarms Using CloudWatch.

Keep in mind the following recommendations when you set your CloudWatch alarm thresholds:

• Amazon SES recommends that you maintain a bounce rate under 5%. Amazon SES might pause your account's ability to send emails if your bounce rate is greater than 10%. We recommend that you set the bounce rate threshold at 0.05 (5%).
• Amazon SES recommends that you maintain a complaint rate under 0.1%. Amazon SES might pause your account's ability to send emails if your complaint rate is greater than 0.5%. We recommend that you set the complaint rate threshold at 0.001 (0.1%).

Note: The metrics for bounces and complaints are available in the CloudWatch metrics only if your account has had a bounce or complaint event. To see the bounce and complaint metrics in the CloudWatch console, you can send test emails to the designated mailbox simulator email addresses.