AWS Messaging & Targeting Blog

Announcing Self-Service Blacklisted Address Removal

UPDATE ON 5/4/16: This article is deprecated. Please see this article instead: Goodbye blacklist. Introducing the suppression list!

We’ve listened to your feedback and are happy to let you know that starting today, you can remove email addresses from the blacklist from within the Amazon SES Console. A blacklisted address is one that Amazon SES will not send emails to because the address has recently caused a hard bounce for any Amazon SES sender.  For more information about blacklisting, see the past blog posts on The Amazon SES “Address Blacklisted” Error and Blacklisting (Part 2).

If you are sure that the email address you are trying to send to is valid but Amazon SES is rejecting it as blacklisted, you can remove the address from the blacklist yourself. To access this feature, go to the SES Console and click the “Blacklist Removal” link in the Navigation column.

Blacklisted address removal

If the blacklist removal request is successful, you will see a “success” message after you submit the form and you can resume sending to that address right away

Please keep in mind that if an address you remove from the blacklist is indeed undeliverable, then the next time anybody sends an email to that address, it will hard bounce and the address will go back on the blacklist. Bounces count against your bounce rate, so make sure you are certain that the address is valid before removing it from the blacklist.

We hope that this new blacklisted address removal process makes your life easier. Thanks for using Amazon SES!