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Tell HN: Gmail rate limiting emails from AWS SES

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Tell HN: Gmail rate limiting emails from AWS SES

#1

Post by saradhi »

Unsure if this is the same for everyone but our notification emails from SES are being rate limited by Gmail.

Background:

One of my apps provides time-sensitive email notifications, for 60-90 days, to the subscribers(paid) - so it is critical to deliver emails. We have been using the same email provider and have been using AWS SES for a couple of years now. We have the SPF, and DKIM all verified. Yet, for the last 3 days, we are getting the below email

```

Sub: Delivery Status Notification (Failure)

Body: Our system has detected an unusual rate of421-4.7.28 unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our421-4.7.28 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been temporarily421-4.7.28 rate limited. Please visit421-4.7.28 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=UnsolicitedRateLimitError to421 4.7.28 review our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines.>

```

Troubleshooting till now: I have got the AWS tech support team confirming my email configuration has no issues. AWS team has informed "The current throttling is just that Gmail is seeing a lot of messages from the SES shared IP and is throttling the messages"

>>> Is anyone facing the same issue with AWS? or similar issues with other bulk email service providers?

>>> How do you deal with such issues in the future? Set up alternative email service providers.

>>> Is this the side effect of Gmail's dormant account deletion rolled out last week?

Re: Tell HN: Gmail rate limiting emails from AWS SES

#4

Post by jeroenhd »

Things like this are to be expected with shared IP addresses for mail services.

This sounds like something Amazon should figure out more than anything. There's probably something going on with a customer or theirs (misconfiguration, spammer, vulnerability exploited) that's triggering spam detection rules.

At least Google reports the issue back to you instead of silently dropping all of your email like many other mail servers do.

Re: Tell HN: Gmail rate limiting emails from AWS SES

#6

Post by baobabKoodaa »

If you are not in the business of selling email delivery, you should be buying email delivery from a company who is in that business. It's extremely hard to get emails delivered and it's even harder for a small company. For your use case you could probably use Postmark and get good delivery with that.

Re: Tell HN: Gmail rate limiting emails from AWS SES

#7

Post by baobabKoodaa »

jeroenhd wrote: post #4

Things like this are to be expected with shared IP addresses for mail services. This sounds like something Amazon should figure out more than anything. There's probably something going on with a customer or theirs (misconfiguration, spammer, vulnerability exploited) that's triggering spam detection rules. At least Google reports the issue back to you instead of silently dropping all of your email like many other mail…

Google also silently drops mail in some cases.

Re: Tell HN: Gmail rate limiting emails from AWS SES

#8

Post by alyandon »

jeroenhd wrote: post #4

Things like this are to be expected with shared IP addresses for mail services. This sounds like something Amazon should figure out more than anything. There's probably something going on with a customer or theirs (misconfiguration, spammer, vulnerability exploited) that's triggering spam detection rules. At least Google reports the issue back to you instead of silently dropping all of your email like many other mail…

I finally started sending anything from AWS SES straight to trash because the spam on their platform is persistent and they are non-responsive to spam reports. I was getting 30+ fraudulent/spam emails a day in just one inbox alone.

Re: Tell HN: Gmail rate limiting emails from AWS SES

#9

Post by LeonM »

This is typically not a big deal, as explained in the message, it is a temporary countermeasure. It'll resolve itself as long as you really aren't spamming.

Though Gmail responds citing your IP, Gmail and all other large email services don't use IP filtering. Just about all email service providers use domain reputation, since IPs are ephemeral.

If you are sending transactional emails that your customers have agreed to, then your domain (!= ip) rating will improve over time and there will be less countermeasures, regardless of which IP you use to send.

> Is anyone facing the same issue with AWS? or similar issues with other bulk email service providers?

This is just Gmail doing it's thing (the right thing, in my opinion, contrary to most HN sentiment). It is independent of which sender you use.

> How do you deal with such issues in the future? Set up alternative email service providers.

Use DMARC reporting to verify that all your email is sent with DKIM alignment, to make sure that you aren't causing the problem. This is independent of email service provider.

But as explained, you are being rate limited, not blocked. Email will be delivered, it'll just take longer. You state that you have a 60-90 day margin for delivery, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

> Is this the side effect of Gmail's dormant account deletion rolled out last week?

No.

Re: Tell HN: Gmail rate limiting emails from AWS SES

#10

Post by anamexis »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #6

If you are not in the business of selling email delivery, you should be buying email delivery from a company who is in that business. It's extremely hard to get emails delivered and it's even harder for a small company. For your use case you could probably use Postmark and get good delivery with that.

Using SES is buying email delivery from a company who is in that business.
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