Amazon SES Notifications (SNS) not working

Question

I am still in the sandbox of Amazons SES trying set a bounce email handler.

I am using the mailbox simulator to test a bounce/complaint email.

I have created a SNS topic (and I have subscribed to receive notifications from this topic):

I have selected this topic to receive bounce email notifications, then I have disabled email notifications:

However, when I send e-mails to [email protected] from SES I still receive a bounceback e-mail and there aren't updates in the SNS topic.

Answer 1

I will try to make this issue clearer with some screenshots.

It can happen outside the sandbox too.

I did not realise that the Amazon SES console can set a SNS bounce/complaint topic for the domain, as well as a separate SNS setting for every verified email address.

So each verified email address can have its own different SNS bounce/complaint topic if you want! If you want them all the same, you have to go and set them all up in the console: tell each one to use SNS, otherwise they have 'Email Feedback Forwarding' set to "enabled" and this will override the setting at domain level.

Answer 2

The configurations of not receiving "Email Feedback" and sending Bounce emails to SNS Topic were set to my Domain example.com.

In my Verified Emails I had [email protected] and I was sending e-mails with it.

It happens that my verified e-mail itself had these configurations too, so when I set them to be like those of my domain, everything started working.

If I had tried to send e-mails with [email protected] it would've worked.

Answer 3

Email Feedback Forwarding and SES notifications via Amazon SNS are exposed as two separate mechanisms. The linked documentation describes as much:

You must receive bounce and complaint notifications either by email or through Amazon SNS – The default method is by email, through a feature called email feedback forwarding.

Since you've shown that Email Feedback Forwarding is disabled, you are likely still receiving bounce notifications via your verified SNS email subscription.

To test, try removing your email subscription from the SNS topic and then sending an email to the bounce simulator again. To test further, you could subscribe a different email address or even an SQS queue to verify that bounce notifications are still being published.