Managing lists and subscriptions in Amazon Simple Email Service

You can manage your own lists for mailing and subscriptions as well as for email suppression in Amazon SES. To help you maintain your sender reputation, SES offers account-level and configuration set-level suppression that prevents you from sending to invalid recipients and harming your sender reputation. As another measure against bounced emails and complaints, SES can automatically add unsubscribe links to all outgoing mail through subscription management.

Each of these types of lists is discussed in detail in the sections listed in this chapter's topics; however, an overview of suppression lists is presented here to understand how they differ as well as a key change with global suppression list management. It's suggested that you read this overview before working with any of the lists discussed in this chapter.

Overview of suppression lists and suppression override mechanism

The global suppression list removal feature is no longer customer facing and you no longer interact with it to manage suppression. The global suppression list operates and is managed in the background by SES. As a customer, you now have available to you an account-level suppression list and configuration set-level suppression overrides that offer you more customized control over how you handle email suppression for your own account.

The different types of suppression lists, their scope, and what advantages they offer is explained below.

The global suppression list was the only type of suppression list until account-level and configuration set-level suppression was introduced in the new Amazon SES console and API v2. The global suppression list is owned and managed by SES to protect the reputation of SES. This is needed because all SES customers are sharing the same pool of IP addresses (unless they have dedicated IPs), it’s important for SES to ensure that customers aren’t sending spam or anything that would negatively impact the reputation of those IP addresses in the SES shared IP pool. While you no longer directly interact with the global suppression list, it still operates in the background and the general tenets of how the global suppression list works can also be applied to explain the overall principles of how the other types of suppression work. See Amazon SES global suppression list.

The account-level suppression list was introduced so that customers can create and control their own suppression list and reputation, thus, the account-level suppression list applies to your account only. The account-level suppression list interface in the new console provides an easy way to manage addresses in your account-level suppression list, including bulk actions to add or remove addresses. If an address is on the global suppression list, but not on your account level suppression list (which means you want to send to it), and you do send to it, Amazon SES will still attempt delivery, but if it bounces, the bounce will affect your own reputation, but no one else will get bounces because they can’t send to that email address if they aren’t using their own account level suppression list; therefore, the account-level suppression list overrides the global suppression list for your account only. See Using the Amazon SES account-level suppression list.

Configuration set-level suppression, while not a list per se, but a mechanism that enables you to configure suppression customizations and overrides to your account-level suppression list through the use of configuration sets specifically created for different email sending scenarios. For example, if your account-level suppression list is configured for both bounce and complaint addresses to be added, but you have a particular email demographic defined in a configuration set for which you're only interested in complaint addresses being added - you would achieve this by enabling this configuration set's suppression overrides so that email addresses are added to your account-level suppression list only for complaints (not bounces and complaints like is set in your account-level suppression list) from email sent with this configuration set. With configuration set-level suppression, there are different levels of overriding your account-level suppression, including not using any suppression at all. See Using configuration set-level suppression to override your account-level suppression list.