Monitoring your Amazon SES sending activity

Amazon SES provides methods to monitor your sending activity. We recommend that you implement these methods so that you can keep track of important measures, such as your account's bounce, complaint and reject rates. Excessively high bounce and complaint rates may jeopardize your ability to send emails using Amazon SES.

You can also use these methods to measure the rates at which your customers engage with the emails you send. For example, these sending metrics can help you identify your overall open and clickthrough rates.

The metrics that you can measure using Amazon SES are referred to as email sending events. The email sending events that you can monitor are:

• Sends – The call to Amazon SES was successful and Amazon SES will attempt to deliver the email.

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

• Bounces – The recipient's mail server permanently rejected the email. This event corresponds to hard bounces. Soft bounces are only included when Amazon SES fails to deliver the email after retrying for a period of time.

• Complaints – The email was successfully delivered to the recipient. The recipient marked the email as spam.

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

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

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

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

• Delivery Delays – The email couldn't be delivered to the recipient 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.

  Note

  To add the DELIVERY_DELAY event type to an event destination, you have to use the UpdateConfigurationSetEventDestination operation in the Amazon SES API V2. Currently, you can't add this event type to a configuration set by using the Amazon SES console.

You can monitor email sending events in several ways. The method you choose depends on the type of event you want to monitor, the granularity and level of detail you want to monitor it with, and the location where you want Amazon SES to publish the data. You're required to use either feedback notifications or event publishing to track bounce and complaint events. You can also choose to use multiple monitoring methods. The characteristics of each method are listed in the following table.

Monitoring Method	Events You Can Monitor	How to Access the Data	Level of Detail	Granularity
Amazon SES console	Deliveries and rejects	Sending Statistics page in Amazon SES console	Count only	Across entire AWS account
Amazon SES console	Bounce and complaint rates	Reputation Dashboard page in Amazon SES console	Calculated rates only	Across entire AWS account
Amazon SES API	Deliveries, bounces, complaints, and rejects	GetSendStatistics API operation	Count only	Across entire AWS account
Amazon CloudWatch console	Sends, deliveries, opens, clicks, bounces, bounce rate, complaints, complaint rate, and rejects	CloudWatch console Note Some metrics don't appear in CloudWatch until the associated event occurs. For example, bounce metrics don't appear in CloudWatch until at least one email that you send bounces, or until you generate a simulated bounce event by using the mailbox simulator.	Count only	Across entire AWS account
Feedback notifications	Deliveries, bounces, and complaints	Amazon SNS notification (deliveries, bounces, and complaints) or email (bounces and complaints only)	Details on each event	Across entire AWS account
Event publishing	Sends, deliveries, opens, clicks, bounces, complaints, rejects, and rendering failures.	Amazon CloudWatch or Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, or by Amazon SNS notification	Details on each event	Fine-grained (based on user-definable email characteristics)

Note

The metrics measured by email sending events may not align perfectly with your sending quotas. This discrepancy can be caused by email bounces and rejections, or by using the Amazon SES inbox simulator. To find out how close you are to your sending quotas, see Monitoring your sending quotas.

For information on how to use each monitoring method, see the following topics:

• Monitoring your sending statistics using the Amazon SES console
• Monitoring your usage statistics using the Amazon SES API
• Monitoring Amazon SES email sending using notifications
• Monitor email sending using Amazon SES event publishing

For information and discussions about a variety of topics related to Amazon SES, see the AWS Messaging and Targeting Blog. To browse and post questions, go to the Amazon SES Forum.