Summary

  • With SES Auto Validation enabled, Amazon checks each outbound recipient against a chosen confidence threshold. A rejected address does not receive the message, but the attempt still consumes the rolling daily sending quota and incurs both the outgoing-message fee and an Auto Validation charge.
  • High admits only high-likelihood recipients and can suppress legitimate medium-confidence addresses. SES records a validation refusal as a Permanent bounce with subtype EmailValidationSuppressed; it appears in the Bounce metric but not the account's Reputation.BounceRate.

The gate charges admission even when it turns you away

Consider an operator who turns up Auto Validation to protect a valuable sending reputation. A campaign contains addresses that SES rates below the selected threshold. Those envelopes stop at the gate. The operator may see fewer risky deliveries, which is exactly why the feature exists. But AWS says each suppressed attempt still occupies daily sending quota and attracts the standard outbound-message charge as well as the validation fee. The gate's refusal is a billable event.

The pricing page makes the arithmetic visible for à-la-carte customers: US$0.10 per 1,000 outbound emails and US$0.01 per 1,000 Auto Validations. Plans and add-ons have different schedules, so those figures are a rate-card example, not a forecast of anyone's invoice. The important point is the ordering. Validation makes a delivery decision after the attempted send has entered the billable and quota-counted path. A suppressed address is not a free non-event.

There are three threshold choices. SES managed lets Amazon adjust the threshold using sending patterns and reputation. High sends only to addresses with high delivery likelihood; AWS explicitly warns it can stop legitimate medium-confidence addresses. Medium allows medium and high, while filtering low-confidence addresses. Turning the threshold up therefore changes more than bounce exposure. It moves the boundary at which a real customer might be stopped, a paid attempt might be wasted, and scarce daily capacity might be used without delivery.

Quota is a second economic meter, distinct from the invoice. AWS measures sending limits over a rolling 24-hour window, separately by Region and by recipient. A message with ten recipients counts as ten. If a sender runs out of its permitted count, SES rejects later send requests. A large suppressed segment can therefore crowd out addresses that would have passed validation. The effect is most acute for an operator working close to its regional limit, but the mechanism applies to every suppressed attempt.

The visibility problem is almost designed in. SES emits an Auto Validation refusal as a Bounce event with bounceType set to Permanent and bounceSubType set to EmailValidationSuppressed. AWS says those events appear in the AWS/SES Bounce metric but do not raise the account's Reputation.BounceRate. A clean reputation chart can coexist with a pile of paid refusals. Event destinations on a configuration set can expose the refusals; account-level settings apply across outbound mail unless a configuration set overrides them. The old account suppression list is a separate tool, with different reasons and persistence. Calling every suppressed recipient an Auto Validation result would wreck the audit.

For an actual operation, the missing number is its own count of validation-suppressed recipients under its plan and threshold. Put that count beside attempted recipients, delivered recipients, remaining rolling quota and the sending bill. If High is rejecting customers the business recognizes, the decision belongs with the owner of the sending objective, not solely the person tending the reputation graph. Amazon controls the gate; the sender chooses how far to close it.

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