Raising your AWS SES Sending Limit

Once you are out of the AWS SES sandbox, AWS gives you a daily sending quota and per-second send rate that grow with you as your list does. AWS raises these automatically for healthy senders, and you can request an explicit increase whenever you need one sooner.

The rest of this article covers how to check your current limits, when AWS bumps them on its own, and how to ask for a higher ceiling when you need it.

Check your current limits

Open the SES Account dashboard in the AWS console. The Sending limits panel shows three numbers:

• Daily sending quota - the maximum emails you can send in any 24-hour rolling window
• Maximum send rate - the maximum emails per second
• Sent in last 24 hours - your current usage against the quota

If you are regularly sending over 50% of your quota, you should plan ahead. AWS does eventually auto-raise limits for healthy senders (see below), but hitting your ceiling mid-campaign means the campaign pauses - Mailblast queues the remaining sends and automatically resumes when your daily quota resets, but a multi-hour delay is rarely what you wanted.

How AWS auto-raises quotas

AWS's documented criteria for automatic quota increases are:

• You send high-quality content that recipients want. Stop sending to subscribers who never open your email.
• You send actual production content to real recipients, not test addresses or internal lists only.
• You send near your current quota regularly. AWS won't raise a limit you've never come close to using.
• You have low bounce and complaint rates. See AWS bounce and complaint rates for the published thresholds.

If you meet all four, AWS may raise your quota before you ever ask. If you don't, or if you need an increase faster than the automatic process, you can request one yourself.

Request an increase manually

AWS handles quota increases through the Service Quotas console. The flow:

1. Open Service Quotas, switch to the region your SES account is in.
2. Navigate to AWS services, choose Amazon Simple Email Service (SES).
3. Find Sending quota or Sending rate in the list and follow the prompts to request an increase.

When asked how much to request, be specific and proportionate. If you are currently at 200/day and need to send to a list of 50,000, ask for an increase that comfortably covers the campaign cadence you actually have planned - not the largest number you might ever need. Disproportionate requests get pushed back to a smaller number anyway.

When asked for context, point at your sending history. The kinds of things to mention:

• Your current sending volume and list size
• Your current bounce and complaint rates (visible on the SES Reputation dashboard) - the lower they are, the easier the case
• Why your volume is growing - more subscribers, new product line, seasonal campaign
• That Mailblast handles bounces, complaints, and unsubscribes automatically

Example:

Our list is at 80,000 subscribers and we are currently sending one campaign per week at 90% of our daily quota. Over the past 30 days our bounce rate has averaged 0.4% and our complaint rate has averaged 0.02%. We are growing roughly 5% per month through opt-in signups and expect to need to send roughly twice our current volume within 60 days. We use Mailblast as our delivery platform, which automatically removes hard bounces, complaints, and unsubscribes from our list.

Approval timeline

AWS's documented SLA for sending quota and sending rate increases is up to 24 hours. If they need more information from you, it can take longer.

If approved, the new limits are live immediately - you do not need to do anything in Mailblast. The next campaign you send will respect the new quota.

If your request is denied or reduced

AWS will explain why in the response. The most common reasons map directly to the auto-increase criteria above: not enough recent sending at the current limit, or bounce/complaint rates that are too high. There is no penalty for resubmitting, and once your sending history has improved, future increases get easier.