Delivery Tracking: Bounces & Spam Complaints

If you send through your own Amazon SES account, two annoying things happen out of the box:

Your inbox gets flooded. Every bounced email and every “abuse report” (someone clicked Mark as Spam) gets forwarded to your sender email address. Send to a few thousand people, and you’ll get a dozen or more of these per campaign — including scary-looking emails from complaints@email-abuse.amazonses.com.
Your list doesn’t clean itself. Cyber Mail 9000 has no way to know an address bounced or a subscriber complained… so it keeps sending to them. That is terrible for your sender reputation.

Delivery Tracking fixes both with one click.

What it does

When you enable it, Cyber Mail 9000 uses your saved AWS credentials to wire up your SES account so delivery events flow back to us instead of into your inbox:

Hard bounces (dead address) → subscriber is marked bounced and never emailed again
Spam complaints (someone hit “Mark as Spam”) → subscriber is marked complained and never emailed again
Deliveries → counted on each broadcast, so you can see real delivery numbers
Feedback forwarding is turned off → no more raw bounce/abuse-report emails to your sender address

Soft bounces (mailbox full, temporary server issues) are logged but do not remove the subscriber — the address isn’t dead.

Why this matters (a lot)

When someone reports your email as spam, the worst thing you can do is email them again. They’ll report you again, and mailbox providers (Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, etc.) will start junking your mail for everyone on your list.

Same for hard bounces: repeatedly sending to dead addresses is a classic spammer signal.

With Delivery Tracking on, both are handled automatically. Your list self-cleans after every send.

How to enable it

Open your brand’s edit page at /brands
Scroll to the Email Delivery section (Amazon SES transport)
Find the DELIVERY TRACKING card
Click ENABLE DELIVERY TRACKING →

That’s it. Behind the scenes, Cyber Mail 9000 creates (in your AWS account):

An SES configuration set (cybermail-events) — or reuses one you already configured
An SNS topic that SES publishes bounce/complaint/delivery events to
A subscription from that topic to Cyber Mail 9000’s event webhook
Turns off SES email feedback forwarding for your verified sender identity

You can disable it at any time with the DISABLE TRACKING button (this restores SES’s default behavior, including the inbox emails).

“Missing permissions” error?

If you followed the Amazon SES Setup guide a while ago, your IAM user may only have SES permissions — but Delivery Tracking also needs a few SNS (Simple Notification Service) permissions to create the topic.

The easy fix:

In AWS, open IAM → Users and click your cybermail9000-ses user
Click Add permissions → Attach policies directly
Attach AmazonSNSFullAccess
Back in Cyber Mail 9000, click ENABLE DELIVERY TRACKING again

(Prefer least-privilege? The error message in the dashboard shows an exact minimal IAM policy you can paste in as an inline policy instead.)

What you’ll see after a campaign

Send a broadcast and, over the next minutes/hours/days:

Broadcast counts update: delivered, bounced, complaints
Bounced/complained subscribers show their new status on the subscriber list and are automatically excluded from all future sends
Your inbox stays quiet — no SES notification emails, no abuse reports

FAQ

Does this cost anything in AWS? Effectively no. SNS charges fractions of a cent per 100,000 notifications; a 10,000-subscriber campaign generates ~10,000 events — well under a penny, and typically within the AWS free tier.

What about unsubscribes? Unsubscribes already work without Delivery Tracking — every email includes one-click unsubscribe links. Delivery Tracking adds the bounce/complaint signal that only Amazon can see.

I got a forwarded email from complaints@email-abuse.amazonses.com — what is it? That’s an abuse report: a recipient clicked “Mark as Spam” and their mailbox provider reported it back through Amazon. With Delivery Tracking enabled, these stop arriving by email and instead automatically remove the complaining subscriber from your sends.

Does this work with SMTP sending (SendGrid, Mailjet, Elastic Email)? SMTP transports have their own bounce webhook — see the setup guide for your provider. Delivery Tracking as described here is specific to the Amazon SES transport.