Amazon SES - Do not want mail forwarded to Amazon as it may cause lost mail

Hi,

We have a (maybe) unique situation. Our company setup Amazon SES to send customer notifications, etc. This appears to be quite reliable! However, we have a potential issue that we hope we can resolve. We configured an MX record as required by Amazon. It is pretty simple to explain. We initially setup the MX records as required...

mail.example.com (priority 5)

And also:

feedback-smtp.us-east-2.amazonses.com (priority 10)

This exposes a potential issue: If we are receiving an email, and the server is rebooting for an update, or there is a temporary connection issue at the hosting provider, the server sending us the mail will then fall back to feedback-smtp.us-east-2.amazonses.com. But because there are a number of mailboxes in the company, there is no way we can receive mail at feedback-smtp.us-east-2.amazonses.com. We need it to not accept any connection, so the SMPT server that sent the mail will re-queue it and try to send it to us again.

I deleted the MX Record to prevent this, then I got the message below from Amazon.

"IMPORTANT: If Amazon SES cannot detect the required MX record in 3 days, you will no longer be able to use "example.com" as a MAIL FROM domain. Consequently, any verified identities that are configured to use this MAIL FROM domain will not be able to send emails unless they are configured to fall back to the Amazon SES default MAIL FROM domain."

Is there any way to prevent feedback-smtp.us-east-2.amazonses.com from accepting any connection for incoming mail for our company, so it will not generate a permanent error? Yesterday there was an issue at our host with receiving connections from different regions (it appears). This caused Gmail to detect feedback-smtp.us-east-2.amazonses.com as our main server even though it was sent from mail.example.com, and it was bounced saying "The IP address sending this message does not have a 550-5.7.25 PTR record setup".

In summary, is there a workaround to prevent Amazon from receiving mail should our regular server be rebooting or have a temporary connection issue. Hope this makes sense.

Thanks,

Steve