The Amazon SES “Address Blacklisted” Error

Today, we wanted to address something that we’re seeing a lot of questions about on our forums – the “Address Blacklisted” Error.

Occasionally, as you send via Amazon SES, you will have your message rejected with an “Address Blacklisted” error. The error you have run into is not a type of enforcement on your account – you are not on an ISP blacklist, and the email address you’re sending from is probably just fine.

This error means that or one or more of the addresses in the To, Cc, or Bcc field of the email you just tried to send is on our blacklist. This happened because an ISP returned an “email doesn’t exist” type error (or hard bounce) for one of those email addresses in the past for ANY Amazon SES sender. After we receive a hard bounce for an email address, that address stays on our blacklist for up to 14 days.

UPDATE ON 3/4/13: You can now remove addresses from the blacklist by using the Amazon SES console! For more information, see the blog post Announcing Self-Service Blacklisted Address Removal.

UPDATE ON 5/8/13: We have replaced the Amazon SES blacklist with the Amazon SES suppression list! For more information, see our blog.