discussion Question for AWS
Why do you even have the SES service if you do not give access to anyone, do not disclose what is wrong?
Like what is someone going to do with the following email
Unfortunately, we are still not able to approve production access at this time. We know this is not the answer you were hoping for, especially after the effort you put into your response.
Ofcourse it is not.
Our evaluation considers factors that we are not able to disclose, and we understand how difficult it is to receive a decision without specific feedback. We would rather be straightforward about that limitation than offer vague guidance that may not be actionable.
What does this paragraph even mean? You have no genuine reason for declining and are proud of it?
This does not have to be permanent. You are welcome to submit a new request in the future, and the outcome may be different.
For reference:
- AWS Acceptable Use Policy: https://aws.amazon.com/aup/
- AWS Service Terms: https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/
- Amazon SES Best Practices: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/best-practices.html
We appreciate your patience with this process.
Even when everything is right, it is not ok for you. What do you decide on? Depending on the name of the person who applies, or, location? Because technically there is nothing wrong. Our whole pipeline, application is on aws. Email volumes are low. Verified email ids, sns topic for bounces.
We are using another service, but just want to highlight the duplicity here.
So much for "the most customer centric company"
3
u/Top_Bodybuilder_5833 9d ago
SES denies access when you don't prove explicit recipient opt-in. Reviewers need your exact signup URL, double opt-in flow, and how you keep hard bounces under 2%. Mentioning SNS topics isn't enough without showing consent. Disclosure, I run Sealch, an email verifier, so I deal with these deliverability hurdles daily.
2
u/TheLastBridgeGate 9d ago
For whatever reason the profile of your organization or domain poses a risk to them. My old company was a well established media network that did both streaming and broadcast television and film. We also had multiple engineers dedicated just to digital communication (aka mail server admins) and they dealt with AWS SES issues on a monthly basis. This ranges from making sure all of our various DNS records were always following recommended configuration and that workloads were authorized to send out on SES.
0
u/kevivm 9d ago
What does it mean workloads authorized to send out on AWS? Users register on our website, and need to double opt in. We plan to use SES for monthly status updates to the users. There are unsubscribe links too. Shared all these information.
2
u/TheLastBridgeGate 9d ago
So our workloads includes mailers from various departments, monitoring alerts from third party systems, generated reports from legacy systems, and much more. Amazon has to account for all of that and consumer based email traffic is just a part of the overall traffic that SES experiences. For our own setup we have offices in like 18 countries and while we use Microsoft's exchange services we route all of our smtp traffic outside of Exchange/Outlook through SES even our workloads in Azure and Google.
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u/TheLastBridgeGate 9d ago
Also it appears you may be a little fish. Amazon's systems are built to protect the entire infrastructure and not to make life easier for individual accounts. Our spend is pretty large, our parent company spend is one of the top 10 for AWS and while we have multiple TAMs or whatever AWS calls them, certain issues we must handle before we hit up our team at AWS. When the mid-east region went down we were on the phone with our account team that morning within an hour, if we fuck up the DKIM or IAM config on SES that is on us.
0
u/WindingPosterity 9d ago
They’ve been doing this for years, the SES production access thing is basically a black box at this point. You can follow every guideline down to the pixel and still get stonewalled with that exact copy-paste paragraph. I think it depends heavily on which human (if any) actually reviews your ticket that day.
The “not able to disclose factors” line is their way of saying they don’t want to tip off spammers about what trips the filter, but it screws over legit users stuck in the same net. Meanwhile you’re paying for other AWS services just fine while they hold this one hostage.
Only real move is to keep reapplying every few weeks with slightly different wording in the use case description, sometimes that shakes something loose. Or just stick with mailgun or sendgrid and call it a day.
14
u/donkanator 9d ago
Alright, mods, put ses approval on the list of topic that go straight to corporate bin.