How to Detect an Amazon SES Sending Pause Automatically

To detect an Amazon SES sending pause, poll the SES v2 GetAccount operation and alert when EnforcementStatus isn't HEALTHY. SES doesn't send an EventBridge event when it pauses your whole account, and the SendingEnabled field doesn't change during an enforcement pause, so a check on that flag will report all clear while nothing goes out.

The notice AWS sends goes to the email address on the AWS account, which is often not the team that runs email. A pause found hours later means queued password resets, receipts and campaigns that failed silently. Here's what AWS documents (read 2 November 2026) and a monitoring setup built on it.

What AWS says to check

From the SES sending review FAQ, "How can I detect an account-level sending pause or reinstatement programmatically?":

• "SES does not emit an Amazon EventBridge event when it pauses or reinstates sending for your entire account. Automation that responds to account-level enforcement must read the account status; it cannot subscribe to an event for it."
• "To read the account status programmatically, call the GetAccount operation in the Amazon SES API v2 and check the EnforcementStatus field. This is the same value shown as Account status in the SES console."
• "Don't use the SendingEnabled field that GetAccount returns for this purpose. That field shows whether you turned account-level sending on or off yourself."

The three statuses

The GetAccount API reference defines them:

EnforcementStatus	AWS's description	What your system should do
HEALTHY	"There are no reputation-related issues that currently impact your account."	Nothing
PROBATION	"We're placing your account under review while you work on correcting these issues."	Alert a person; consider holding risky streams
SHUTDOWN	"Your account's ability to send email is currently paused because of an issue with the email sent from your account."	Stop the send queue, alert, fail over transactional mail if you have a backup

The status is per AWS Region. If you send from more than one Region, poll each.

A minimal monitor

1. Poll on a schedule. A scheduled Lambda (EventBridge Scheduler) or a cron job runs aws sesv2 get-account --region us-east-1 and reads EnforcementStatus. The IAM role needs ses:GetAccount.
2. Alert on change, not on every run. Store the last value and notify (SNS, Slack, PagerDuty) when it changes in either direction, so you also hear when you're reinstated.
3. Gate the queue. Have your sending worker check the stored status before it pulls a batch. On SHUTDOWN, stop pulling and keep messages queued instead of letting every send fail.
4. Log the review details. GetAccount also returns Details.ReviewDetails with a CaseId and Status; record them so whoever answers the Support Center case has them.

Catch it before the review

The poll tells you a review or pause has happened. These warn you earlier:

• CloudWatch alarms on Reputation.BounceRate and Reputation.ComplaintRate. AWS reviews accounts at a 5% bounce rate and may pause at 10%; for complaints, review at 0.1% and a possible pause at 0.5%. Our post on SES bounce rate reviews has the full thresholds.
• AWS Health Dashboard. AWS adds an "SES sending paused" event to the event log when it pauses an account, and you can alarm on new Health events. AWS notes the event "always has a Status of Closed", so read it as "this happened", not as the current state.
• Your own bounce and complaint feeds. SNS notifications per configuration set show which stream is going wrong.

Two kinds of review don't show up in these metrics at all: direct complaints and spam-trap reports. See SES direct complaints and SES spam-trap reviews.

Stop the most common cause

Most SES pauses follow a review that wasn't fixed in time, and bounce reviews usually start with an import of old or bought addresses. Check imports before they reach SES: the bounce rate calculator shows how far a list's expected bounces sit from the 5% line, and the verify page removes the addresses that would bounce.

Where SimpleVerifier fits

Verification removes invalid, disposable and dead-domain addresses before they count toward your SES bounce rate. It doesn't monitor your SES account; that's the poll above. The first 100 checks are free with a Google sign-in on the verify page. Pro is $39 a month with the first 100,000 checks a month at full speed, then slower, never cut off, and one-time packs of 10,000 checks for $15 never expire. See pricing.