@timconsidine Thanks for the great piece of info! I didn't know AWS can see if sandbox testing was done or not. In my experience, AWS seems seems to be getting stricter with granting production access to SES. They also look at how you monitor and manage bounces and complaints and whether you are setting any limits for the bounce rate and complaint rate.
@hollosch I also received that email response when I applied for SES production access last month. What I did was that I also had to tell them how I was tracking the bounce and complaint rates:
- using the metrics dashboard in the Console
- setting up the alerts and notifications with SNS (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/monitor-sending-activity-using-notifications-sns.html)
- telling them what my bounce rate and complaint rate limits are (I just followed what they mentioned in the SES docs for this one)
in addition to what was already mentioned by @timconsidine. I also did the sandbox testing to verify if my SNS notifications work.
While this has worked for me, I can't guarantee if it'll work for you because there could be other factors involved in the approval process I'm not aware of. Hope this helps!