Monitor email sending using Amazon SES event publishing

To enable you to track your email sending at a granular level, you can set up Amazon SES to publish email sending events to Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Data Firehose, Amazon Pinpoint, Amazon Simple Notification Service, or Amazon EventBridge based on characteristics that you define.

You can track several types of email sending events, including sends, deliveries, opens, clicks, bounces, complaints, rejections, rendering failures, and delivery delays. This information can be useful for operational and analytical purposes. For example, you can publish your email sending data to CloudWatch and create dashboards that track the performance of your email campaigns, or you can use Amazon SNS to send you notifications when certain events occur.

How event publishing works with configuration sets and message tags

To use event publishing, you first set up one or more configuration sets. A configuration set specifies where to publish your events and which events to publish. Then, each time you send an email, you provide the name of the configuration set and one or more message tags, in the form of name/value pairs, to categorize the email. For example, if you advertise books, you could name a message tag genre, and assign a value of sci-fi or western, when you send an email for the associated campaign.

Depending on which email sending interface you use, you either provide the message tag as a parameter to the EmailTags field of the SendEmail API operation or add the message tag to the SES-specific email header X-SES-MESSAGE-TAGS. For more information about configuration sets, see Using configuration sets in Amazon SES.

In addition to the message tags that you specify, SES also adds auto-tags to the messages you send. You do not need to perform any additional steps to use auto-tags.

The following table lists the auto-tags that are automatically applied to messages you send using SES.

Fine-grained feedback for email campaigns

The ses:feedback-id-<a or b> tag is an optional message tag that you can think of as a hybrid or semi-automatic tag—while it's similar to the auto-tags discussed in the previous section, the difference is that you must manually add it and use the ses: prefix key. You can use up to two of these tags defined as ses:feedback-id-a and ses:feedback-id-b.

When you specify these tags, SES automatically appends them to the standard Feedback-ID header which is used in providing delivery statistics, such as complaint and spam rates, as part of a feedback loop (FBL), see Feedback loops. The Feedback-ID header is comprised of the identifier, SESInternalID, used by SES for collecting complaint information, and the static tag, AmazonSES, identifying SES as the sending platform such as:

FeedBackId:feedback-id-a:feedback-id-b:((SESInternalID):(AmazonSES))

These optional feedback ID tags are offered as a way for you to generate fine-grained feedback, such as for messages you send as part of an email campaign. You can use ses:feedback-id-<a or b> by specifying it as a message tag in the EmailTags field of the SendEmail operation request as shown in the following example:

{
  "FromEmailAddress": "noreply@example.com",
  "Destination": {
    "ToAddresses": [
      "customer@example.net"
    ]
  },
  "Content": {
    "Simple": {
      "Subject": {
        "Data": "Hello and welcome"
      },
      "Body": {
        "Text": {
          "Data": "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet."
        },
        "Html": {
          "Data": "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet."
        }
      }
    }
  },
  "EmailTags": [
    {
      "Name": "ses:feedback-id-a",
      "Value": "new-members-campaign"
    },
    {
      "Name": "ses:feedback-id-b",
      "Value": "football-campaign"
    }
  ],
  "ConfigurationSetName": "football-club"
}

If sending in raw format, you would add ses:feedback-id-<a or b> as a message tag to the SES-specific header X-SES-MESSAGE-TAGS.

The ses:feedback-id-<a or b> message tag can also be tracked in Amazon CloudWatch by specifying it as a CloudWatch value source just like any other message tag, see Adding a CloudWatch Event Destination (Additional charges apply, see Price per metric for CloudWatch.)

How to use event publishing

The following sections contain the information you need to set up and use SES event publishing.

Event publishing terminology

The following list defines terms related to SES event publishing.