Managing your Amazon SES sending limits - Amazon Simple Email Service

Managing your Amazon SES sending limits

Your Amazon SES account has a set of sending quotas that regulate the number of email messages that you can send and the rate at which you can send them. Sending quotas benefit all Amazon SES customers because they help to maintain the trusted relationship between Amazon SES and email providers. Sending quotas help you to gradually ramp up your sending activity and decrease the likelihood that email providers block your emails because of sudden, unexpected spikes in your email sending volume or rate.

The following quotas apply to sending email through Amazon SES:

  • Sending quota—The maximum number of emails that you can send in a 24-hour period. This quota is calculated on a rolling time period. Every time you try to send an email, Amazon SES determines the number of emails that you sent in the previous 24 hours. As long as the total number of emails that you have sent in the past 24 hours is less than this daily maximum, your send request is accepted and your email is sent.

    If sending a message would exceed the daily maximum for your account, your call to Amazon SES is rejected.

  • Sending rate—The maximum number of emails that Amazon SES can accept from your account each second. You can exceed this quota for short bursts, but not for sustained periods of time.

    Note

    The rate at which Amazon SES accepts your messages can be less than the maximum send rate for your account.

  • Maximum message size (MB)—The maximum email size that you can send. This includes any images and attachments that are part of the email after MIME encoding. For example, if you attach a 5MB file, the attachment size in the email after MIME encoding will be ~6.85MB (about 137% of the original file size).

    Note

    We recommend you upload your attachments to cloud drives and include the URL of cloud drive attachment to reduce email size and improve deliverability. SES cannot guarantee that large emails will end up in the recipient mailbox as different mail servers will have varying size based policies.

Your Amazon SES sending quotas are separate for each AWS Region. For information about using Amazon SES in multiple AWS Regions, see Regions and Amazon SES.

When your account is in the Amazon SES sandbox, you can only send 200 messages per 24-hour period, and your maximum sending rate is one message per second. When you submit a request to have your account removed from the sandbox, you can also request that your quotas are increased at the same time. For more information about having your account removed from the sandbox, see Request production access (Moving out of the Amazon SES sandbox).

When your account has been removed from the sandbox, you can request additional quota increases at any time by creating a new case in the AWS Support Center. For more information, see Increasing your Amazon SES sending quotas.

Note

Sending quotas are based on recipients rather than on messages. For example, an email that has 10 recipients counts as 10 against your quota. However, we don't recommend that you send an email to multiple recipients in a single call to the SendEmail API operation, because if the call fails, the entire email is rejected. We recommend that you call SendEmail once for every recipient.