We're launching a new SaaS application and need Amazon SES only for low-volume transactional messages such as account verification, login codes, and password resets. We won't send marketing emails, use purchased lists, or perform bulk outreach. We requested an initial production limit of just 1,000 emails per day.
Our team already uses SES successfully across several other customer environments and has no history of abuse. AWS asked detailed questions about our sending practices, which we answered, and also asked why we weren't using accounts where SES limits had already been raised. We explained that this is a new company, product, and AWS organization, so we created a dedicated production account.
The request was rejected with only a general statement that AWS couldn't disclose the assessment criteria. Since the account remains in the SES sandbox, this is blocking our application launch. Has anyone successfully appealed a rejection like this, or found an effective escalation path for a manual review?
3 Answers
If AWS won't approve the account in time, using a separate transactional email provider may be the most practical launch workaround. It can still be integrated cleanly while keeping the rest of the application on AWS. I understand that this may complicate auditing and compliance, but SES reviews can be difficult to predict for new accounts.
The likely issue is the account's new history rather than the stated volume. SES is unusually conservative because compromised accounts can cause immediate deliverability and abuse problems. Creating separate AWS organizations may be good operational practice, but it also means the new account has none of the reputation or usage history associated with your older environments. You could ask whether the account can be evaluated alongside the company identity and existing sending history, while also preparing a fallback provider for the launch.
Make sure the production-access request clearly documents the application, expected daily and monthly volume, sending frequency, sample message types, domain authentication, bounce and complaint handling, unsubscribe behavior where relevant, and how users trigger each email. If the request has already been rejected, open a support case and ask specifically for the SES review team to reconsider it. There may not be a guaranteed appeal process, but a detailed operational explanation is the strongest escalation route.
That matches our suspicion. We created the separate organization for isolation and compliance, but it seems to have removed the account history AWS would use to evaluate us. We've already submitted detailed information and contacted support, though no specific rejection reason was provided.