boberdoo blog

Amazon SES Suspended My Account: Case Study

Written by admin | Apr 6, 2016 3:07:51 PM

Any experienced email marketer will tell you that sending your campaigns using multiple ESPs is a great practice. It allows you to intelligently throttle your sending, increase deliverability rates and much more. But just like any email sending service, your account is eligible to be suspended or revoked at any time. To our surprise, this is exactly what happened to one of our Amazon SES accounts. Here’s what happened.

Amazon SES Usage

At boberdoo, we use multiple 3rd party ESPs to send our marketing and notification emails. When we got a notification saying our Amazon SES account was suspended, we were a bit shocked. We follow all of Amazon’s service terms and maintain extremely low bounce and spam rates. So why was our account suspended?

Amazon Reply

In the response from Amazon SES, they informed us that they believed we were not gaining consent from our recipients, but allowed us to provide additional information regarding our methods.

Reinstatement

After receiving our reply, our Amazon SES account was re-opened and once again eligible to send.

What Does This Mean?

We were shocked when Amazon suspended our SES account, but we learned something valuable that we are happy to share with our clients. This could happen to you. If you are following Amazon’s service terms, your account will likely be reactivated upon request, but what happens in the meantime while your account is not eligible to send? Your email campaigns come to a standstill. Using multiple ESPs is essential. When our Amazon account was suspended, our backup ESPs continued sending each of our campaigns without skipping a beat.