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Unable to track SES/SNS Open events by recipient

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I am processing SES events with a lambda that receives the events via an SNS topic that is a destination for a configuration set. I have no problems receiving Send, Delivery, Bounce, Open and so on. My use case sends emails to a single address, with a bcc to a second address. My problem is I don't see a way of distinguishing the recipients for an Open event. By contrast, it is straightforward to distinguish the recipients for a Delivery event. In that case the SNS JSON event payload has a "delivery" key that contains a "recipients" array that lists the email addresses delivered to. In my case, two Delivered events, one for the "to" address and one for the "bcc" address. Perfect. For the "Open" event there is a corresponding "open" key in the payload. But it doesn't seem helpful. It contains a timestamp, a userAgent and an ipAddress. I don't know what the ipAddress refers to, but whatever it is, it seems unlikely to provide a robust way of determining which recipient opened the email. Can anyone help me figure out which recipient opened the email? TIA.

1 Answer
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Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) does not expose recipient-level information in Open events. According to the official documentation, these events contain only metadata such as the event timestamp, user agent, and originating IP address. In contrast to Delivery events, which include a recipients array that identifies the specific addresses to which the message was delivered, Open events cannot be tied to an individual recipient. This limitation arises because the tracking pixel used to record opens is embedded once per message rather than on a per-recipient basis.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/working-with-event-data.html

https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/ses-email-opens-clicks

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answered 7 months ago

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