Announcing the Reputation Dashboard

The Amazon SES team is pleased to announce the addition of a reputation dashboard to the Amazon SES console. This new feature helps you track issues that could impact the sender reputation of your Amazon SES account.

What information does the reputation dashboard provide?

Amazon SES users must maintain bounce and complaint rates below a certain threshold. We put these rules in place to protect the sender reputations of all Amazon SES users, and to prevent Amazon SES from being used to deliver spam or malicious content. Users with very high rates of bounces or complaints may be put on probation. If the bounce or complaint rates are not within acceptable limits by the end of the probation period, these accounts may be shut down completely.

Previous versions of Amazon SES provided basic sending metrics, including information about bounces and complaints. However, the bounce and complaint metrics in this dashboard only included information for the past few days of email sent from your account, as opposed to an overall rate.

The new reputation dashboard provides overall bounce and complaint rates for your entire account. This enables you to more closely monitor the health of your account and adjust your email sending practices as needed.

Can’t I just calculate these values myself?

Because each Amazon SES account sends different volumes of email at different rates, we do not calculate bounce and complaint rates based on a fixed time period. Instead, we use a representative volume of email. This representative volume is the basis for the bounce and complaint rate calculations.

Why do we use representative volume in our calculations? Let’s imagine that you sent 1,000 emails one week, and 5 of them bounced. If we only considered a week of email sending, your metrics look good. Now imagine that the next week you only sent 5 emails, and one of them bounced. Suddenly, your bounce rate jumps from half a percent to 20%, and your account is automatically placed on probation. This example may be an extreme case, but it illustrates the reason that we don’t use fixed time periods when calculating bounce and complaint rates.

When you open the new reputation dashboard, you will see bounce and complaint rates calculated using the representative volume for your account. We automatically recalculate these rates every time you send email through Amazon SES.

What else can I do with these metrics?

The Bounce and Complaint Rate metrics in the reputation dashboard are automatically sent to Amazon CloudWatch. You can use CloudWatch to create dashboards that track your bounce and complaint rates over time, and to create alarms that send you notifications when these metrics cross certain thresholds. To learn more, see Creating Reputation Monitoring Alarms Using CloudWatch in the Amazon SES Developer Guide.

How can I see the reputation dashboard?

The reputation dashboard is now available to all Amazon SES users. To view the reputation dashboard, sign in to the Amazon SES console. On the left navigation menu, choose Reputation Dashboard. For more information, see Monitoring Your Sender Reputation in the Amazon SES Developer Guide.

We hope you find the information in the reputation dashboard to be useful in managing your email sending programs and campaigns. If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment on this post, or let us know in the Amazon SES forum.