SES account paused for Complaint Rates

Question

I was very surprised to discover yesterday that my SES account has been suspended since Saturday.  My complaint rates have been around 0.05% or less for years. For some reason, they spiked to over 1% on Saturday (5 days ago).

Side note: I never got notified that my account was suspended! I had to discover it days later when I realized that email was not going out.

FYI. I am using Sendy to manage and send my email.

I actually cannot find the data to support these complaint rates. I did send an email to my mailing list on Friday Nov 10.  The size of the list is relatively the same for a long time. The number has even gone down slightly because or unsubscribes, bounces, etc. This should show the track record of sending mail to this list.

If I look at my data for this email list, the last email that was marked as spam was back on Oct 19th. As you can see from the second screenshot, I do keep track of bounces, unsubscribes and complaints inside of my system.

When I look at the report for the email that I sent on Friday, there was one email that did get a bounce. However, I do not have a single instance of a complaint for this email.

None of my email lists have change at all for a long time. If you look at my account sending history, I am pretty consistent in the number of email sent out. The size of my lists have not changed outside of what would be considered normal churn of adding/removing subscribers to the list.

How can I discover the actual data that is driving these complaint rates? I cannot find it in Sendy (which does subscribe to SNS topics) or in AWS Console.

I filed a support ticket yesterday but have not heard back from anyone about the case. I upgraded to a paid support plan purely to see if I can get help faster on this.

Answer

I just discovered somehting that I completely overlooked before. On Nov 11th, my SES dashboard claims that I sent out 256,000+ emails. I DID NOT DO THAT!!!!!

Does this mean my account has been hacked? How can I determine how and where this happened?

Answer

Hello,

Greetings of the day and I hope you are doing good.
Thank you for contacting AWS Premium Support. My name is Priya and I will be working with you on this case.

Before we proceed, we would like to sincerely apologize for the long delay. Rest assured, we will ensure no further delay is incurred whatsoever.

While we as a part of re:post community do not have visibility into the support case raised, I would like to provide details to each of your concern below with the data shared in the post-

**Concern 1**: Regarding not being notified about SES sending being suspended in account.

a)When you account emails sending is paused/under review-  You'll always receive a notification at the email address associated with your AWS account. It is the email you provided while creating AWS account. If you want to change the email address associated with the account so you can get emails related to AWS account, you may do so by following the document here:

[https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/change-email-address
]()

b)You can also use the Account dashboard to determine the current status of your account. For example, if your account's ability to send email is currently paused, the Account status section of the Account dashboard displays a status of Paused. If your account is able to send email normally, it displays a status of Healthy.

c)Finally, you can check the AWS Health Dashboard (PHD) at https://phd.aws.amazon.com/ to determine if your account's ability to send email is currently paused. When we pause an account's ability to send email, we automatically add an SES sending paused event to the Event log section of the PHD. The SES sending paused event always has a Status of Closed, regardless of whether or not the account's ability to send email is currently paused. The event log also includes a copy of the email that we sent to the email address associated with your AWS account when the sending pause event occurred.

**Concern 2**: How can I discover the actual data that is driving these complaint rates? I cannot find it in Sendy (which does subscribe to SNS topics) or in AWS Console.

You can enable verbose logging for complaint event and leverage these SES monitoring methods:

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/monitor-sending-activity.html
]()

The detailed logs will help you locate the source IP and more about the complaint events so you can timely take action on the complaint events.

Our review team ideally replies in 24 hours so I believe you should have got a response now.

If not, you can reach out to Premium Support to contact the review team internally and expedite your request. If you have Business or Enterprise Support Plan you contact us via phone or chat as soon as you are available following instructions below:

[https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/aws-phone-support
]()

Hope our assistance was helpful and have a nice day ahead.

SES account paused for Complaint Rates

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