I'm curious if anyone has ever encountered their AWS account being suspended because of an accidental email abuse incident. In the past, my company used SendGrid for transactional emails, but we had a spam wave due to a vulnerability, leading to thousands of malicious emails sent. SendGrid was pretty lenient; they suspended us, asked for an explanation and a remediation plan, and re-enabled our account once we fixed the issue. Now, I'm working on a personal project with AWS SES, but I've faced multiple rejections for production access. It makes me wonder: Is AWS much stricter than SendGrid regarding email policies? Is it more challenging to get production access with AWS SES? If there's an incident of email abuse, can you recover and appeal after fixing things, or does AWS permanently block your account? I'd love to hear your experiences or any advice you might have. Thanks!
4 Answers
The reason 'email providers' are highlighted might come off as unusual. It could seem like it was written by AI, but I've seen that some people just prefer highlighting key names for better readability.
AWS is definitely stricter than SendGrid. They request a lot of information from you. When I applied, I had to submit a detailed plan outlining how I handle email abuse – I even copied in a lengthy document just to make sure I covered everything! You’ll need a terms and conditions page along with clear opt-in and unsubscribe workflows laid out in your appeal.
Should I include screenshots showing the Unsubscribe management setup and opt-in records when I reopen my case?
I kept it simple and only said I wanted SES for notifications, and they approved me without any trouble!
Yes, AWS has strict requirements. You're expected to demonstrate during the application that you have processes in place to monitor and address any abuse. If you exceed specific bounce or complaint thresholds, you'll get warnings, and failure to correct this can lead to account restrictions or blocks. Regarding production access, getting approved is more manual with AWS. Don’t expect to get through without giving a detailed description of how you deal with spam and abuse.
Thanks for the in-depth info, this is really useful!
Every email provider has its limits. For instance, AWS gives warnings at a 5% bounce rate and risks account suspension at 10%. The complaint percentages are even stricter. Thankfully, I got production access for 100,000 emails per day quickly and without any issues, but I can’t say what happens in case of a suspension since I haven’t faced that myself.
Thanks for sharing this info!
I thought the bold names were weird too, but I guess it should help with clarity.