Understanding Amazon SES and SNS relationship - Email failures (bounces)

Hello,

Let me answer your question after providing a small explanation of what is going on. If your recipient's receiver (for example, an email provider) fails to deliver your message to the recipient, the receiver bounces the message back to Amazon SES. Amazon SES then notifies you of the bounced email through email or through Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), depending on how you have your system set up.

AWS is legally obligated to send you bounce and complaint notifications. So there is no way to disable these notifications. In order to send email using Amazon SES, you must have a system in place for managing bounces and complaints. Amazon SES can notify you of bounce or complaint events in three ways: by sending a notification email, by notifying an Amazon SNS topic, or by publishing sending events. You have to enable one method of receiving bounce or complaint notifications. You can send notifications to the domain or email address that generated the bounce or complaint, or to an Amazon SNS topic. If you don't set up one of these methods of receiving bounce or complaint notifications, Amazon SES automatically forwards bounce and complaint notifications to the Return-Path address (or the Source address, if you didn't specify a Return-Path address) in the email that resulted in the bounce or complaint event, even if you disabled email feedback forwarding. If you disable email feedback forwarding and enable event publishing, you must apply the configuration set that contains the event publishing rule to all emails you send. In this situation, if you don't use the configuration set, Amazon SES automatically forwards bounce and complaint notifications to the Return-Path or Source address in the email that resulted in the bounce or complaint event.

Now to your questions:

#1 - Why did it send those failure emails to marketing.dogs.com? Answer: marketing.dogs.com is the one you used in either the Return-Path address, or the FROM address. Since you have disabled Feedback Forwarding, a notification will be sent to the email address specified in either the Return-Path, or the FROM headers.

#2 - How did it know to send the failure emails it to marketing.dogs.com and not something like: emailfailures.dogs.com? (how do I set that?) Answer: It sent to marketing.dogs.com because it was specified in the FROM or the Return-Path headers. You can control that by providing a Return-Path header when you send out a message.

#3 - Why am I receiving these failure emails to begin with? Answer: SES is legally obligated to inform the customers of all bounces and complaints (Incase SES receives a notification from the MTA "Mail Transfer Agent" that a message has been marked as SPAM). These notifications should be used by the customer to refine their mailing list to maintain their domain reputation and IP reputation if they are using dedicated IPs. If SES did not provide these notifications, and the reputation of your domain or dedicated IP is damaged and no more message can be sent out from a specific domain, as all ISPs have marked this domain as a spam generator, then the domain itself might be lost and no messages can be sent from it any more. This is why SES has to inform the customers of all the bounces and complaints if available.

For more about this, please refer to the below documentation link https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/monitor-sending-activity-using-notifications.html

I believe this covers all of your concerns.

Best Regards, Mo