Email Receiving: SES sends failure notification even if message is delivered

Question

I set up email receiving. My domain is verified.

I have an active rule set, consisting of one rule, matching my entire domain.

The rule has only two actions:
1. **Deliver to Amazon S3 bucket** (with SNS notification)
2. **Stop rule set**.

**Spam and virus scanning** is enabled.

Everything is fine: recipients receive messages.

But if the status of the `dkimVerdict` and/or the `dmarcVerdict` is `GRAY` for a received message, the sender receives a failure notification, as if the message was rejected, ***even if it's successfully delivered***.

The diagnostic code in the notification is *smtp; 451 4.3.0 This message could not be delivered due to a recipient error. Please try again later.*.

I tried to send messages from domains with DMARC policies correctly set (both verdict show status `PASS`) and I didn't get failure notifications.

Anyone else facing this issue?

Thank you!
Paolo

Accepted Answer

I finally figured everything out.

It had nothing to do with `dkimVerdict` and/or the `dmarcVerdict` being `GRAY`.

A collegue of mine had an old rule in place, for the same domain, which delivered received messages to an S3 bucket. The bucket was removed, but the rule was still there and, of course, it was failing to execute.

Paolo

Email Receiving: SES sends failure notification even if message is delivered

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