Lessons from sending mass emails via Amazon SES
Today I did some big mass emails via Amazon SES. Delfin released a new music video, and I had to send a press release to about 1650 journalists’ inboxes and to 6500 inboxes from the fan base. A few numbers and a slap on the wrist from Amazon below the cut.
I started the campaign from an account specifically set up for the task, registered to, let’s say, the management. The account was new, so it had a starter limit of 1000 emails per day and 1 email per second, which obviously wasn’t enough. After hitting that limit I switched to my own account, which is already up to 10,000 emails per day and 5 emails per second.
The list had been built up over a long time of work. The result — out of 1650 inboxes, 240 emails bounced. Almost all of them — addresses that no longer exist. About 10 came back as spam, many of them on the same domain. Several bounced because the recipient inboxes are full and refuse new mail, which in my view is essentially the same as being dead.
Next came the list of 6500 — registered users of Delfin’s fan site (I don’t think they’ll mind, the news of a new video is a pleasant one, and a mailing like this happens at most twice a year). Some of those, of course, are spam bots that stalled at the email-activation stage. I have no idea how many bounced from that list — at 410 the inbox on Masterhost (where all the bounces and error messages were collected) glitched out. It stopped accepting new messages, and refused to even open some of them.
The result — 30 minutes ago I got an email from Amazon that says:
Dear Amazon SES Customer,
Our analysis of your Simple Email Service sending pattern is showing that certain parameter(s) of your sending are at unacceptable levels. If these metrics do not improve, we will suspend your SES sending privileges. For each metric that is at an unacceptable level, we will allow you a defined number of emails to be sent to bring the metric back up to acceptable levels. Please note that if your sending quality decreases further actions may be taken before you have sent the number of emails noted below.
*Unacceptably High Bounce Rate: 1,414 of the last 11,000 emails you have sent have bounced.
*This issue must be fixed within the next 40,000 emails you send.
So they basically wagged a finger at me — 1,414 emails bounced and the sending quality is suffering. Don’t fix it, and we’ll throttle you.
Looked at the stats — 7,429 emails went out from my account in 24 hours. Which means about 19% of the messages were sent in vain and threaten sanctions.
The takeaway — if you’re doing (legitimate) mailings, you have to keep your address list fresh. It saves nerves and time later.