Question about complaint notifications from AWS SES

Question

I received a complaint notification related to one of the email addresses that our application sent email to. And, I added that email address to the suppression list. After that, I also got the complaint notifications, but it specified complaint.complaintSubType = OnAccountSuppressionList.

I would like to get more clear understanding if it is correct that once an address is added to the suppression list, the SES service no longer sends emails to the recipient, but when I try to send them an email, a complaint-notification is created and it will contain complaint.complaintSubType = OnAccountSuppressionList. I couldn't find it in the documentation.

Makendran G · Accepted Answer

Yes, your understanding is correct. When an email address is added to your Amazon SES account's suppression list, Amazon SES will no longer send emails to that recipient address. However, if you attempt to send an email to a suppressed address, Amazon SES will generate a complaint notification with the complaintSubType set to OnAccountSuppressionList.

The purpose of this notification is to inform you that an email was not sent due to the recipient address being on your account's suppression list. This serves as a safeguard and a reminder that the address is suppressed, so you don't inadvertently continue attempting to send emails to that address.

Kindly check the below documentation to know more about the JSON object which contains information about complaints fields.

[+] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/notification-contents.html#complaint-object

Below is the excerpt taken from the above documentation.

```
If the value is OnAccountSuppressionList, Amazon SES accepted the message, but didn't attempt to send it because it was on the account-level suppression list.
```

Question about complaint notifications from AWS SES

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