How to receive bounce replies to e-mail address when sending via Amazon SES? [Xenforo Forum Bounce Handling]

Hello,

We've hit the 10% bounce limit on our Amazon SES account.

We dug deeper into the domain that was responsible for the majority of the bounces (mydomain.com), which took quite a bit of time.

Bounced handling in the code on that Xenforo Forum site has been and currently is **correctly ** configured and enabled where it disables sending e-mails to incoming bounced replies as per the following:

      Bounced Email Address:  bounced@mydomain.com 
      
      If an email cannot be delivered, the bounce notification will be returned to this email address. If left blank, bounced messages will be returned to the default email address. A value is required here if automated bounce handling is to be enabled. Note that this option may not work unless the return path parameter is enabled or mail is sent via SMTP using the Email Transport option.

       Enable variable bounced email address values:  ENABLED

      If enabled, sent emails will include the recipient email address in the bounce address field. This enables more accurate and more secure automated bounce email handling. If using automated bounce processing, enabling this option is strongly recommended.

      This option requires that the specified bounce account is a catch-all account or supports a "+" as a wildcard separator (such as in Gmail). For example, if this option is enabled with a bounce address of bounce@example.com , the email might be returned to bounce+123abc+user=domain.com@example.com .

      Automated Bounced Email Handler
       Enable automated bounced email handler:  ENABLED
      Connection Type: POP3

      Host: mail.mydomain.com:110
      User Name and Password:  bounced@mydomain.com 
       Encryption: None

      This option allows the "Bounced Email Address" account to be automatically read and processed for bounced email reports. This will detect if emails sent to a user bounce, forcing the user to update their email address and preventing the system from emailing them until this happens. This can help reduce the chance of email sent from your board from being considered spam.

      This option will read and remove emails from the specified account when processing. It MUST be directed to an account whose sole purpose is collecting bounce emails from this XenForo installation. A value must be entered for the "Bounced Email Address" option.

      Soft Bounce Trigger Threshold
      Minimum number of bounces: 1
      Minimum number of days with bounces: 1
      Minimum number of days between oldest and newest bounce: 0
      If automated bounce processing is enabled, this criteria will be used to determine when multiple soft bounce failures will be considered permanent and emails will no longer be sent to the user.

      All threshold values are limited to bounces generated in the last 30 days.

However, when we checked the Bounced logs for the mydomain.com domain in the Xenforo Admin Panel, we don't see any bounces.

This is telling us that the outgoing e-mails sent with Amazon SES with a bounced reply-to e-mail of "bounced@mydomain.com " is not actually sending the bounced replies to that e-mail address.

We double-checked by checking the bounced@mydomain.com inbox and it was empty (including the spam folder).

We triple-checked by sending a test e-mail to invalid address and no bounce reply was received on "bounced@mydomain.com ".

In order for the bounce-handling to work on the mydomain.com domain, e-mails sent through Amazon SES need to bounce back to "bounced@mydomain.com " so that the Xenforo Forum software can find it in the inbox for the bounced address and disable further sending of e-mail to that user's e-mail address.

Since on the domain and site's end everything is setup correctly, can you please advise why bounced replies would not be received on "bounced@mydomain.com" when e-mails are sent through Amazon SES and what we need to do on Amazon SES so that they are received on that address when e-mails are sent via Amazon SES?

Thank you!