Monitor email sending using Amazon SES event publishing

To enable you to track your email sending at a granular level, you can set up Amazon SES to publish email sending events to Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Data Firehose, Amazon Pinpoint, or Amazon Simple Notification Service based on characteristics that you define.

You can track several types of email sending events, including sends, deliveries, opens, clicks, bounces, complaints, rejections, rendering failures, and delivery delays. This information can be useful for operational and analytical purposes. For example, you can publish your email sending data to CloudWatch and create dashboards that track the performance of your email campaigns, or you can use Amazon SNS to send you notifications when certain events occur.

How event publishing works with configuration sets and message tags

To use event publishing, you first set up one or more configuration sets. A configuration set specifies where to publish your events and which events to publish. Then, each time you send an email, you provide the name of the configuration set and one or more message tags, in the form of name/value pairs, to categorize the email. For example, if you advertise books, you could name a message tag genre, and assign a value of sci-fi or western, when you send an email for the associated campaign.

Depending on which email sending interface you use, you either provide the message tag as a parameter to the EmailTags field of the SendEmail API operation or add the message tag to the SES-specific email header X-SES-MESSAGE-TAGS. For more information about configuration sets, see Using configuration sets in Amazon SES.

In addition to the message tags that you specify, Amazon SES also adds auto-tags to the messages you send. You do not need to perform any additional steps to use auto-tags.

The following table lists the auto-tags that are automatically applied to messages you send using Amazon SES.

Amazon SES Auto-Tags
Auto-tag name	Description
ses:caller-identity	The IAM identity of the Amazon SES user who sent the email.
ses:configuration-set	The name of the Configuration Set associated with the email.
ses:from-domain	The domain of the "From" address.
ses:outgoing-ip	The IP address that Amazon SES used to send the email.
ses:source-ip	The IP address that the caller used to send the email.
ses:source-tls-version	The TLS protocol version the caller used to send the email.

Fine-grained feedback for email campaigns

The ses:feedback-id-<a or b> tag is an optional message tag that you can think of as a hybrid or semi-automatic tag—while it's similar to the auto-tags discussed in the previous section, the difference is that you must manually add it and use the ses: prefix key. You can use up to two of these tags defined as ses:feedback-id-a and ses:feedback-id-b.

When you specify these tags, SES automatically appends them to the standard Feedback-ID header which is used in providing delivery statistics, such as complaint and spam rates, as part of a feedback loop (FBL), see Feedback loops. The Feedback-ID header is comprised of the identifier, SESInternalID, used by SES for collecting complaint information, and the static tag, AmazonSES, identifying SES as the sending platform such as:

FeedBackId:feedback-id-a:feedback-id-b:((SESInternalID):(AmazonSES))

These optional feedback ID tags are offered as a way for you to generate fine-grained feedback, such as for messages you send as part of an email campaign. You can use ses:feedback-id-<a or b> by specifying it as a message tag in the EmailTags field of the SendEmail operation request as shown in the following example:

{
  "FromEmailAddress": "[e-mail]",
  "Destination": {
    "ToAddresses": [
      "[e-mail]"
    ]
  },
  "Content": {
    "Simple": {
      "Subject": {
        "Data": "Hello and welcome"
      },
      "Body": {
        "Text": {
          "Data": "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet."
        },
        "Html": {
          "Data": "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet."
        }
      }
    }
  },
  "EmailTags": [
    {
      "Name": "ses:feedback-id-a",
      "Value": "new-members-campaign"
    },
    {
      "Name": "ses:feedback-id-b",
      "Value": "football-campaign"
    }
  ],
  "ConfigurationSetName": "football-club"
}

If sending in raw format, you would add ses:feedback-id-<a or b> as a message tag to the SES-specific header X-SES-MESSAGE-TAGS.

The ses:feedback-id-<a or b> message tag can also be tracked in Amazon CloudWatch by specifying it as a CloudWatch value source just like any other message tag, see Adding a CloudWatch Event Destination (Additional charges apply, see Price per metric for CloudWatch.)

How to use event publishing

The following sections contain the information you need to set up and use Amazon SES event publishing.

• Setting up event publishing

• Working with event data

Event publishing terminology

The following list defines terms related to Amazon SES event publishing.

Email sending event

Information associated with the outcome of an email you submit to Amazon SES. Sending events include the following:

• Send – The send request was successful and Amazon SES will attempt to deliver the message to the recipient’s mail server. (If account-level or global suppression is being used, SES will still count it as a send, but delivery is suppressed.)

• RenderingFailure – The email wasn't sent because of a template rendering issue. This event type can occur when template data is missing, or when there is a mismatch between template parameters and data. (This event type only occurs when you send email using the SendTemplatedEmail or SendBulkTemplatedEmail API operations.)

• Reject – Amazon SES accepted the email, but determined that it contained a virus and didn’t attempt to deliver it to the recipient’s mail server.

• Delivery – Amazon SES successfully delivered the email to the recipient's mail server.

• Bounce – A hard bounce that the recipient's mail server permanently rejected the email. (Soft bounces are only included when SES is no longer retrying to deliver the email. Generally these soft bounces indicate a delivery failure, although in some cases a soft bounce can be returned even when the mail reaches the recipient inbox successfully. This typically occurs when the recipient sends an out-of-office automatic reply. Learn more about soft bounces in this AWS re:Post article.)

• Complaint – The email was successfully delivered to the recipient’s mail server, but the recipient marked it as spam.

• DeliveryDelay – The email couldn't be delivered to the recipient’s mail server because a temporary issue occurred. Delivery delays can occur, for example, when the recipient's inbox is full, or when the receiving email server experiences a transient issue.

• Subscription – The email was successfully delivered, but the recipient updated the subscription preferences by clicking List-Unsubscribe in the email header or the Unsubscribe link in the footer.

• Open – The recipient received the message and opened it in their email client.

• Click – The recipient clicked one or more links in the email.

Configuration set

A set of rules that defines the destination that Amazon SES publishes email sending events to, and the types of email sending events that you want to publish. When you send an email that you want to use with event publishing, you specify the configuration set to associate with the email.

Event destination

An AWS service that you publish Amazon SES email sending events to. Each event destination that you set up belongs to one, and only one, configuration set.

Message tag

A name/value pair that you use to categorize an email for the purpose of event publishing. Examples are campaign/book and campaign/clothing. When you send an email, you either specify the message tag as a parameter to the API call or as an Amazon SES-specific email header.

Auto-tag

Message tags that are automatically included in event publishing reports. There is an auto-tag for the configuration set name, the domain of the "From" address, the caller's outgoing IP address, the Amazon SES outgoing IP address, and the IAM identity of the caller.