Simulating SES Bounce, Complaint, and Reject Events

Triggering SES bounce, complaint, and reject notifications with simulator addresses, without sending real mail to any recipient.

Takahiro Iwasa

2021-02-21

2 min read

Amazon SES provides simulator addresses for testing how an application handles bounce, complaint, and reject notifications without sending email to real recipients. See the official documentation for details.

Prerequisites

Before starting, complete the following:

Verify an email address in Amazon SES.
Enable Email Feedback Forwarding for the registered email address.

Email Feedback Forwarding Setup

Simulating Bounce

A bounce can be simulated with:

aws ses send-email \
  --from <YOUR_EMAIL> \
  --to [email protected] \
  --subject test \
  --text test

You will receive an email at the address specified by the --from option, indicating a bounce occurred.

Bounce Simulation Example

Simulating Complaint

A complaint follows the same pattern, targeting a different simulator address:

aws ses send-email \
  --from <YOUR_EMAIL> \
  --to [email protected] \
  --subject test \
  --text test

An email indicating a complaint will be sent to the --from address.

Complaint Simulation Example

Simulating Reject

A reject requires sending an email with an EICAR test file attachment, which SES’s virus scanning flags:

FROM=<YOUR_EMAIL>
MESSAGE='{"Data": "From: $FROM\nTo: $FROM\nSubject: test\nMIME-Version: 1.0\nContent-type: Multipart/Mixed; boundary=\"NextPart\"\n\n--NextPart\nContent-Type: text/plain\n\ntest\n\n--NextPart\nContent-Type: text/plain;\nContent-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"sample.txt\"\n\nX5O!P%@AP[4\\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*\n\n--NextPart--"}'
MESSAGE=$(echo $MESSAGE | sed "s/\$FROM/$FROM/g")
aws ses send-raw-email \
  --cli-binary-format raw-in-base64-out \
  --raw-message "$MESSAGE"

You will receive a rejection notification email at the FROM address.

Reject Simulation Example

Conclusion

The SES mailbox simulator can trigger bounce, complaint, and reject notifications without sending email to real recipients.

The [email protected] and [email protected] addresses work with a standard send-email call, making it easy to test these notification paths during development.

The reject case requires send-raw-email and a MIME payload containing an EICAR test attachment. Test this path separately rather than assuming that bounce-handling code will also process a virus-scan rejection correctly.