We accidentally had ses credentials set up on our QA server and quickly got banned for sending too many sdf@sdf.com emails. Took quite some time to get it unbanned. Since then we switched to Mailgun for email delivery but ses is still useful for processing incoming email via Lambda
Very good point about sending test e-mails, which also reminds me of the next friendly reminder: SES has a Mailbox Simulator [0] where you can send e-mails to specific e-mail addresses and check the notifications you receive, e.g., bounces.
If you're using the SNS notifications [1], these notifications will be JSON objects [2]; you can then use a notification to extract the information needed, e.g. a bouncing e-mail address to be stored in a local registry in case of a bounce notification.
We are careful to use throwaway email addresses like randomusername@mailinator.com on our dev and staging servers so they still get delivered, but we can just forget about them.
Really interested to learn about the SES simulator address though (posted as a reply on this thread) - don't know how we missed that, and it would have really helped with early testing when we were developing the email queueing system on our app.
We configure all our test addresses to success@ses.amazon.com (or whatever the simulator address actually is) so we don’t spam or get banned by inadvertance
From [0]:
> If your bounce rate is 5% or greater, we'll place your account under review.
To sum it up, try to keep track of bounced e-mails by using the SES notifications [1].
[0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/e-faq....
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/monito...