amazon ses email logs

Amazon SES email logs can mean a few different things, depending on what you’re trying to see:

What SES gives you

Amazon SES doesn’t store a full “mailbox-style” log by default, but it does provide delivery and engagement event data such as:

• Send — message accepted by SES
• Delivery — delivered to recipient server
• Bounce — hard/soft bounce
• Complaint — recipient marked as spam
• Reject — SES rejected the message
• Open — email opened
• Click — link clicked
• RenderingFailure — template rendering failed

Where to find SES logs/events

You typically get them through one of these:

1. Amazon CloudWatch

SES can publish event metrics and event data to CloudWatch for monitoring.

2. Amazon S3

You can configure SES to write event notifications to an S3 bucket via configuration sets and event destinations.

3. Amazon SNS

SES can send notifications to SNS topics for bounces, complaints, deliveries, etc.

4. EventBridge

You can route SES events to EventBridge for processing and archiving.

If you want actual “logs”

Use SES Configuration Sets with event publishing enabled. That gives you event records for each message, often including:

• message ID
• recipient
• event type
• timestamp
• SMTP response / diagnostic code
• sending IP / remote MTA details sometimes

Common setup for logs

1. Create a configuration set
2. Add event destinations
3. Choose where to send events:
   • CloudWatch
   • SNS
   • Kinesis Firehose
   • EventBridge
4. Attach the configuration set when sending email

Example use cases

• Track bounce rate
• Debug delivery issues
• Confirm whether an email was opened or clicked
• Audit outbound message activity

CLI example

If you want to inspect SES sending activity, you can also use AWS CLI:

aws sesv2 list-email-identities
aws sesv2 get-account

If you want event logging, you’d usually configure it rather than query raw logs.

Important note

If you’re looking for the content of emails, SES does not provide inbox archiving or full message body logs unless you build that yourself before sending.

If you want, I can show you:

1. How to enable SES logs step by step
2. How to send SES logs to CloudWatch/S3
3. How to query SES events with CloudWatch Logs Insights or Athena