Virtual Deliverability Manager advisor

The Virtual Deliverability Manager advisor helps to optimize your email deliverability and engagement by identifying key performance and infrastructure issues at the account and sending identity levels that are adversely affecting your email deliverability and reputation. It provides solutions by providing specific guidance on how to resolve the identified issue.

Advisor’s infrastructure recommendations are listed in the Open recommendations table. The recommendations identify standard email authentication problems, such as when SPF, DKIM, DMARC, or BIMI records don’t exist or have problems with their configuration such as being malformed or having a key length that's too short. They're categorized by severity of Impact, Identity name of the sending domain, and the Age of the alert. In the search bar, a list box provides the option to filter on impact level, infrastructure category, or sending identity name. The Last checked column shows a relative time of when the recommendation was last updated, such as "Just now" or "15 minutes ago". The last column, Resolve issue, provides a link to the relevant section in the Amazon SES Developer Guide with guidance about how to resolve the identified issue.

Open recommendations display in the Virtual Deliverability Manager advisor sorted by impact level.

If you don't have any ongoing advisor notifications, a message will indicate that you don’t have any open recommendations. We recommend that you check the advisor on a regular basis. Optionally, you can integrate these advisor notification events with Amazon EventBridge to build scalable event-driven applications as explained in Monitoring SES events using Amazon EventBridge.

You can also access the Resolved recommendations table from the Virtual Deliverability Manager advisor page, which lists infrastructure issues that you’ve resolved by implementing the advisor's guidance. Resolved recommendations are listed with an initial status that describes the issue before it was resolved. Resolved recommendations expire after 30 days.

What the Virtual Deliverability Manager advisor's looking for

In the previous section we discussed that Virtual Deliverability Manager's advisor performs checks against your sending domain to determine if you've configured a safely authenticated infrastructure to ensure you maintain a high rate of email deliverability and maintain a good sender reputation. Before you activate the Virtual Deliverability Manager advisor, we think it would be helpful for you to know exactly what the advisor's checking and what it's looking for in those checks.

You can use this table as a reference to go through your sending domain's configuration and correct any of these elements that are not aligned to the standards listed in this table before they become problems that the advisor has to alert you to.

Type of check	Advisor message	Why the advisor's alerting you	Learn more
Complaint rate check	ISP_name ISP has high/med/low complaint rate.	Identity has exceeded complaint recommendations threshold for this ISP.	Monitoring sender reputation
DKIM configuration	DKIM verification is not enabled.	DKIM is not enabled per identity.	Easy DKIM in SES
DKIM key strength	DKIM signing key length is below 2048 bits.	DKIM signing key length is not using at least 2048 bits.	Easy DKIM in SES
DKIM DNS record validation	DKIM verification has failed.	DKIM CNAME records determined invalid after looking up and trying to validate the key.	Verifying a DKIM domain identity with your DNS provider
DMARC configuration	DMARC configuration was not found.	DMARC TXT records are missing.	Setting up the DMARC policy on your domain
DMARC DNS record format check	DMARC configuration could not be parsed.	Invalid format found for DMARC TXT records.	Setting up the DMARC policy on your domain
DMARC's DKIM configuration	DKIM record was not found.	No DKIM record was found in order to comply with DMARC.	Complying with DMARC through DKIM
DMARC's DKIM configuration	DKIM record is not aligned.	The domain specified in the DKIM signature does not align (match) with the domain in the From address.	Complying with DMARC through DKIM
SPF configuration	SPF record was not found.	SPF TXT record missing for Custom MAIL FROM domain.	Configuring your custom MAIL FROM domain
SPF "include" configured	SPF record for Amazon SES was not found.	include:amazonses.com is missing from SPF TXT record.	Configuring your custom MAIL FROM domain
SPF enforcement configured	SPF all qualifier is missing.	~all is missing from SPF TXT record.	Configuring your custom MAIL FROM domain
SPF enforcement validation	An SPF configuration issue was found.	Attempts to detect the required SPF MX record within 72 hours failed.	Custom MAIL FROM domain setup states
BIMI configured	BIMI record not found or configured without default selector.	BIMI TXT records are missing or lack the selector attribute.	Setting up BIMI
BIMI format validation	BIMI has malformed TXT record.	BIMI TXT record determined as misconfigured after checking for the presence and valid format of: version, certificate URL, and logo URL.	Setting up BIMI

Using the Virtual Deliverability Manager advisor in the Amazon SES console

The following procedure shows you how to use the Virtual Deliverability Manager advisor in the Amazon SES console to resolve identified deliverability issues using the Amazon SES console.

To use the Virtual Deliverability Manager advisor to resolve deliverability and reputation issues

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon SES console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ses/.

2. In the left navigation pane, choose Advisor under Virtual Deliverability Manager.

   Note

   Advisor will not be visible if you haven't enabled Virtual Deliverability Manager for your account. For more information, see Getting started with Virtual Deliverability Manager.

3. The Open recommendations table displays by default. Recommendations are categorized by Impact (High/Low), Identity name (sending domain), Age (of the alert), and Recommendation/Description (identified issue). In the search bar, filter on the Impact level, the infrastructure issue Category, or the Identity name of the sending domain.

4. To remediate a problem that's described in the Recommendation/Description column, choose the link in the Resolve issue column for that row, and implement the suggested solution.

   Note

   After you implement a solution, the resolved issue can take up to six hours to be reflected. You can view the resolved issue on the Resolved recommendations tab.

Accessing your Virtual Deliverability Manager recommendations using the AWS CLI

The following examples show you how to access your Virtual Deliverability Manager recommendations using the AWS CLI.

To access your Virtual Deliverability Manager recommendations using the AWS CLI

You can use the ListRecommendations operation in the Amazon SES API v2 to list your deliverability recommendations. You can call this operation from the AWS CLI, as shown in the following examples.

• List the recommendations to see deliverability issues:

  aws --region us-east-1 sesv2 list-recommendations

• Apply filters to retrieve recommendations for a specific domain that you own:

  aws --region us-east-1 sesv2 list-recommendations --cli-input-json file://list-recommendations.json

• The input file looks similar to this:

  {
    "PageSize":100,
    "Filter":{
      "RESOURCE_ARN": "arn:aws:ses:us-east-1:123456789012:identity/example.com"
     }  
  }