Troubleshooting event publishing issues in Amazon SES

Over the past year, we’ve released several features that make it easier to track the metrics that are associated with your Amazon SES account. The first of these features, launched in November of last year, was event publishing.

Initially, event publishing let you capture basic metrics related to your email sending and publish them to other AWS services, such as Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. Some examples of these basic metrics include the number of emails that were sent and delivered, as well as the number that bounced or received complaints. A few months ago, we expanded this feature by adding engagement metrics—specifically, information about the number of emails that your customers opened or engaged with by clicking links.

As a former Cloud Support Engineer, I’ve seen Amazon SES customers do some amazing things with event publishing, but I’ve also seen some common issues. In this article, we look at some of these issues, and discuss the steps you can take to resolve them.

Before we begin

This post assumes that your Amazon SES account is already out of the sandbox, that you’ve verified an identity (such as an email address or domain), and that you have the necessary permissions to use Amazon SES and the service that you’ll publish event data to (such as Amazon SNS, CloudWatch, or Kinesis Data Firehose).

We also assume that you’re familiar with the process of creating configuration sets and specifying event destinations for those configuration sets. For more information, see Using Amazon SES Configuration Sets in the Amazon SES Developer Guide.

Amazon SNS event destinations

If you want to receive notifications when events occur—such as when recipients click a link in an email, or when they report an email as spam—you can use Amazon SNS as an event destination.

Occasionally, customers ask us why they’re not receiving notifications when they use an Amazon SNS topic as an event destination. One of the most common reasons for this issue is that they haven’t configured subscriptions for their Amazon SNS topic yet.

A single topic in Amazon SNS can have one or more subscriptions. When you subscribe to a topic, you tell that topic which endpoints (such as email addresses or mobile phone numbers) to contact when it receives a notification. If you haven’t set up any subscriptions, nothing will happen when an email event occurs.

For more information about setting up topics and subscriptions, see Getting Started in the Amazon SNS Developer Guide. For information about publishing Amazon SES events to Amazon SNS topics, see Set Up an Amazon SNS Event Destination for Amazon SES Event Publishing in the Amazon SES Developer Guide.

Kinesis Data Firehose event destinations

If you want to store your Amazon SES event data for the long term, choose Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose as a destination for Amazon SES events. With Kinesis Data Firehose, you can stream data to Amazon S3 or Amazon Redshift for storage and analysis.

The process of setting up Kinesis Data Firehose as an event destination is similar to the process for setting up Amazon SNS: you choose the types of events (such as deliveries, opens, clicks, or bounces) that you want to export, and the name of the Kinesis Data Firehose stream that you want to export to. However, there’s one important difference. When you set up a Kinesis Data Firehose event destination, you must also choose the IAM role that Amazon SES uses to send event data to Kinesis Data Firehose.

When you set up the Kinesis Data Firehose event destination, you can choose to have Amazon SES create the IAM role for you automatically. For many users, this is the best solution—it ensures that the IAM role has the appropriate permissions to move event data from Amazon SES to Kinesis Data Firehose.

Customers occasionally run into issues with the Kinesis Data Firehose event destination when they use an existing IAM role. If you use an existing IAM role, or create a new role for this purpose, make sure that the role includes the firehose:PutRecord and firehose:PutRecordBatch permissions. If the role doesn’t include these permissions, then the Amazon SES event data isn’t published to Kinesis Data Firehose. For more information, see Controlling Access with Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose in the Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose Developer Guide.

CloudWatch event destinations

By publishing your Amazon SES event data to Amazon CloudWatch, you can create dashboards that track your sending statistics in real time, as well as alarms that notify you when your event metrics reach certain thresholds.

The amount that you’re charged for using CloudWatch is based on several factors, including the number of metrics you use. In order to give you more control over the specific metrics you send to CloudWatch—and to help you avoid unexpected charges—you can limit the email sending events that are sent to CloudWatch.

When you choose CloudWatch as an event destination, you must choose a value source. The value source can be one of three options: a message tag, a link tag, or an email header. After you choose a value source, you then specify a name and a value. When you send an email using a configuration set that refers to a CloudWatch event destination, it only sends the metrics for that email to CloudWatch if the email contains the name and value that you specified as the value source. This requirement is commonly overlooked.

For example, assume that you chose Message Tag as the value source, and specified “CategoryId” as the dimension name and “31415” as the dimension value. When you want to send events for an email to CloudWatch, you must specify the name of the configuration set that uses the CloudWatch destination. You must also include a tag in your message. The name of the tag must be “CategoryId” and the value must be “31415”.

For more information about adding tags and email headers to your messages, see Send Email Using Amazon SES Event Publishing in the Amazon SES Developer Guide. For more information about adding tags to links, see Amazon SES Email Sending Metrics FAQs in the Amazon SES Developer Guide.

Troubleshooting event publishing for open and click data

Occasionally, customers ask why they’re not seeing open and click data for their emails. This issue most often occurs when the customer only sends text versions of their emails. Because of the way Amazon SES tracks open and click events, you can only see open and click data for emails that are sent as HTML. For more information about how Amazon SES modifies your emails when you enable open and click tracking, see Amazon SES Email Sending Metrics FAQs in the Amazon SES Developer Guide.

The process that you use to send HTML emails varies based on the email sending method you use. The Code Examples section of the Amazon SES Developer Guide contains examples of several methods of sending email by using the Amazon SES SMTP interface or an AWS SDK. All of the examples in this section include methods for sending HTML (as well as text-only) emails.

If you encounter any issues that weren’t covered in this post, please open a case in the Support Center and we’d be more than happy to assist.