Monitoring Your Amazon SES Sending Activity

Amazon SES provides methods for monitoring your sending activity. It's best to implement these methods so you can track important measures - such as your account-based undeliverability, complaint and rejection rates.

Using these methods, you can also measure how many customers respond to the emails you send, quantifying customer engagement. For example, these send metrics can be used to determine the overall open and click-through rates of your emails.

The metrics that can be measured with Amazon SES are called email send events. You can monitor the following email send events:

Sends: The API call to Amazon SES was successful and Amazon SES will attempt to deliver the email.
Rejects: Amazon SES accepted the email, then discovered that it contained a virus and rejected it. Amazon SES did not attempt to deliver the email to the recipient's email server.
Bounces: The email was finally rejected by the recipient's email server. This event corresponds to permanent undeliverability. Temporary undeliverables are only recorded if Amazon SES has tried unsuccessfully to deliver the email for a certain period of time.
Complaints: The email was delivered to the recipient. The recipient has marked the email as spam.
Deliveries: Amazon SES has delivered the email to the recipient's email server.
Opens - the recipient has received the message and opened it in an email client.
Clicks - the recipient has clicked on at least one link in the email.
Rendering Failures - the email was not sent due to a rendering problem with the template. This event type only occurs when you send an email using the SendTemplatedEmail or SendBulkTemplatedEmail API operation. This event type may occur when template data is missing or the template parameters do not match the data.
Delivery delays - the email could not be sent to the recipient because of a temporary problem. Delivery delays can occur, for example, when the recipient's inbox is full or the receiving e-mail server has a temporary problem.

Note

To add the DELIVERY_DELAY event type to an event destination, you must use the UpdateConfigurationSetEventDestination operation in Amazon SES API V2. Currently, you cannot add this event type to a configuration set using the Amazon SES Console.

You can monitor email send events in several ways. The method you choose depends on the type of event you want to monitor, the level of granularity and detail you want to monitor, and where you want Amazon SES to publish the data. You must use either feedback notifications or event publishing to track undeliverability and complaint events. You also have the option to use multiple monitoring methods. See the table below for the characteristics of each method.

Monitoring Method	Monitorable Events	Data Accessed via	Detail	Granularity
Amazon SES console	Deliveries and Rejections	Page of Shipment statistics in Amazon SES console	Count Only	Total AWS account
Amazon SES console	Undeliverabililty and Complaint Rates	Reputation Dashboard Page in Amazon SES console	Calculated Rates Only	Total AWS conto
Amazon SES API:	Deliveries, undeliverables, complaints, and rejections	GetSendStatistics API Operation	Count Only	Total AWS account

Amazon CloudWatch console

Shipments, deliveries, opens, clicks, undeliverables, undeliverability rate, complaints, complaint rate, and rejections

CloudWatch console

Note Some metrics are not displayed in CloudWatch until the associated event occurs. For example, undeliverability metrics are not displayed in CloudWatch until at least one sent email is undeliverable or you generate a simulated undeliverability event using the mailbox simulator.	Count Only	Entire AWS account
Feedback Notifications	Deliveries, undeliverables and complaints	Amazon SNS notification (Deliveries, undeliveries or complaints) or Email (only undeliveries and complaints)	Details of each event	Entire AWS account
Event Publication	Send, deliver, click, send undeliverable notification, complain, reject, and render errors.	Amazon CloudWatch or Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose or notification through Amazon SNS	Details for each event	Differentiated (based on custom email properties).

Note

Metrics measured from email send events may not match your send quotas. This discrepancy can be caused by undeliverable and rejected emails or by using the Amazon SES mailbox simulator. For more information on how to find out when your send quota limit has been reached, see Monitor your send quota.

For more information on using each monitoring method, see the following topics:

Visit the AWSMessaging and Targeting Blog for information and discussion on a variety of topics related to Amazon SES. To browse and post questions, visit the Amazon SES Forum.