[jcrites]

Sorry to hear about that experience. One of SES's primary goals was keeping abuse off of the service, though no system is perfect. When I worked on SES, more than 50% of the team's total time went into fighting abuse. Part of that effort was comprehensive monitoring of a variety of feedback signals, including bounces, spam complaints, and other data. Individual senders are encouraged to monitor their own sending via the Reputation Dashboard and related facilities [1].

SES also monitors these signals, and if it detects signs of abuse, such as elevated bounces or spam complaints, then a sender's ability to send may be paused and the account's activity may be reviewed. FAQ on these processes [2]. Some of the tolerates are quite tight, and can result in action being taken even if much less than a percent of messages are getting these sorts of responses. There's a lot more that I can't describe in a short comment.

SES processes and reacts to spam reports sent in standard formats like the Abuse Reporting Format (ARF), and looks at signals like List-Unsubscribe and bounces, etc. But this does require the system to understand the format of the reports used by the feedback loops [3]. Do you happen to know if your feedback loop sent spam complaints in ARF format? If you'd like to discuss further, feel free to reach out to me directly.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/announc...

[2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/e-faq....

[3] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/email-d...

[cpncrunch]

I submitted multiple reports to [e-mail] including headers, and received automated responses. For some spammers I reported them 4 times, but the spam kept coming.

I think you've confirmed what I said in my parent comment...SES doesn't take a zero tolerance approach.

I think it is the shared IPs that I've blocked (54.240.27.189/24). You'll see they are on multiple blacklists.

[donmcronald]

Do you literally block (aka drop) mail from SES IPs? That's awful for your users.

If you really distrust mail from those IPs so much, why not just filter it straight to SPAM? At least you'd be delivering it and your users could whitelist senders (or domains) they trust.

[cpncrunch]

My users are: me. I get 100% spam from that ip range. This prevents me wasting my time on this spam.

[sethammons]

I also work in this space. We have many customers who leave email platforms on Amazon because the IP space is polluted. Many inbox providers are extra cautious with email from those IPs because spamming is easy. Even if your IP is not used for spamming, someone else in the same /24 space could be.

[donmcronald]

I feel like they could solve that by making people buy-in to shared IP pools where the low volume pricing is a relatively high one time fee.

For example, if you want a quota of 100 messages per day, you have to pay a one time fee of $.10 per message to get into the pool, so $10. If you want a quota of 50k messages per day you have to pay a one time fee of $.005 per message, so $250.

[webbie917]

I don't love the pricing examples (cost prohibitive for many), but I like an idea of IP pool clusters where you pay to be on a certain tier level.

[CodeWriter23]

> Do you literally block (aka drop) mail from SES IPs? That's awful for your users.

My good friend has worked on the email system for a mid-range consumer ISP for about the past 10 or so years. He told me 93% of all email they receive is spam. And they have a 60PB NAS for their mail store. So for every 1PB of storage they had to discard ~14PB of junk. And that’s just the stuff they summarily dismiss. Then some of the remaining 7% they accept makes it to your Junk folder.