The Amazon SES Reputation Dashboard is the free Reputation metrics page in the SES console, and it shows the same account-level bounce rate, complaint rate, and account status the AWS SES team uses when deciding whether to place an account under review or pause sending (AWS, 2026). AWS retired the old paid "Deliverability Dashboard" add-on in favour of Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM), so "Reputation Dashboard" today means the free Reputation metrics page, not the legacy product. This guide walks through what that page shows, the exact thresholds AWS applies (5% bounce, 0.1% complaint), how it differs from VDM, and how to wire CloudWatch alarms so you find out about a problem before AWS does.
What the Reputation Dashboard Actually Shows
The Reputation metrics page surfaces three things (AWS, 2026). An Account status summary (Healthy, Under review, Pending end of review decision, Sending paused, or Pending sending pause), a Bounce Rate percentage with its own status, and a Complaint Rate percentage with its own status. It also shows any active reputation notifications - spamtrap hits, anti-spam organization reports, listbombing flags, and other signals that sit outside the core bounce and complaint numbers but still affect your standing.
Both metrics are calculated over a "representative volume" of recent mail rather than a fixed rolling window. AWS sizes that volume per account so a low-volume sender's metrics are not whipsawed by a handful of bounces, while a high-volume sender's numbers reflect actual recent behaviour rather than an old spike. The volume adjusts as your sending pattern changes (AWS, 2026). What that means in practice: the dashboard is a moving snapshot of your last few hundred thousand or few million emails - whichever is statistically meaningful for your account.
Notable exclusions from the calculations: soft bounces never count, bounces against verified identities you own do not count, and any mail you send through the SES inbox simulator is excluded entirely. That last point is useful during testing - you can deliberately trigger bounces against the simulator addresses to validate your pipeline without polluting the production dashboard (AWS, 2026).
How to Read Each Metric
The dashboard uses three operating bands per metric, with the bounce rate and complaint rate each having their own thresholds. Knowing where those lines sit is the entire point of the page. AWS does not publish a numerical reputation score, so these thresholds are the closest thing you have to a public scoring rubric.
Bounce Rate
A hard bounce is an email sent to an address that does not exist. AWS recommends keeping the bounce rate below 5% (AWS, 2026). The thresholds:
- Healthy band: below 5%. Normal operation. The dashboard shows Bounce Rate status as Healthy.
- Under review band: 5% or higher. AWS automatically opens a review case on your account.
- Sending pause band: 10% or higher. AWS may pause the account's ability to send while the review proceeds.
The 5% number is a ceiling, not a target. In a healthy email program, hard bounce rates should sit well below 2% on a normal day. If your account is consistently bouncing at 3-4%, you are one bad import away from a review case. Treat anything north of 2% as a warning sign and audit list hygiene before AWS does.
Complaint Rate
A complaint is a recipient reporting your message as spam, usually via the Report Spam button in their mail client. AWS recommends keeping the complaint rate below 0.1% (AWS, 2026). The thresholds:
- Healthy band: below 0.1%. Normal operation.
- Under review band: 0.1% or higher. Automatic review case.
- Sending pause band: 0.5% or higher. AWS may pause sending while it reviews.
The complaint thresholds are an order of magnitude tighter than the bounce thresholds, and they should be. A 0.1% complaint rate already means one in every thousand recipients hit the spam button. Most well-run programs sit between 0.01% and 0.05% complaint rates in steady state; crossing 0.05% should prompt a content and frequency review before it crosses into the AWS warning band.
Account Status
The composite Account status field rolls up bounce, complaint, and any other active notifications into one label. Healthy means nothing is open. Under review means at least one metric or notification has triggered an automatic review and you have a Support case to respond to. Pending end of review decision and Pending sending pause are intermediate states that require a human SES Trust and Safety review before AWS takes further action. Sending paused means the account cannot send until the issue is resolved (AWS, 2026). The horizontal bar chart below shows where the bounce-rate thresholds sit relative to a normal operating band.
Reputation Dashboard vs Virtual Deliverability Manager
These are two different SES features and people conflate them constantly. The Reputation Dashboard (officially "Reputation metrics") is the free, always-on console page that shows account-level bounce, complaint, and status. Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM) is a separate, optional SES feature you turn on explicitly. It adds per-ISP delivery insights, a configuration advisor, and inbox placement testing on top of the basic reputation numbers (AWS, 2026). VDM is billed in two tiers: a tiered per-message SES deliverability rate (from $0.07 per thousand emails) for the per-ISP insights and advisor, and a flat-fee Global deliverability tier ($1,250 per month, launched May 2026) for inbox placement testing and blocklist monitoring across mailbox providers.
| Feature | Reputation Dashboard | Virtual Deliverability Manager |
|---|---|---|
| Recommended for most accounts | ✓ Yes (always on) | Optional add-on |
| Cost | Free with every SES account | From $0.07/1k emails (SES deliverability tier) + $1,250/mo (Global deliverability tier) |
| Account-level bounce rate | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Account-level complaint rate | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Sending status (Healthy / Under review / Paused) | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Per-ISP open / click / delivery insight | ✗ No | ✓ Yes |
| Configuration advisor (DKIM, SPF, DMARC checks) | ✗ No | ✓ Yes |
| Inbox placement testing | ✗ No | ✓ Yes (Global tier) |
| Blocklist monitoring | Notifications only | ✓ Yes (Global tier) |
The practical split: every SES sender should read the Reputation Dashboard daily during early sending and weekly after that. VDM becomes worth turning on when you need per-ISP attribution (Gmail vs Yahoo vs corporate filters), want SES to flag authentication misconfigurations automatically, or care about inbox placement beyond raw delivery. For a deeper walkthrough of what VDM adds and when the spend pays off, see our Amazon SES Virtual Deliverability Manager guide.
When the Dashboard Shows a Problem
If the dashboard flips out of Healthy, AWS will already have opened a Support case on your account. Read that case first - it contains the specific notification type (bounce, complaint, spamtrap, listbombing, anti-spam org, mailbox provider feedback) and a short description of what triggered the review. The case is also the only channel for responding once you have implemented changes. AWS does not lift a review by watching the metric trend back down on its own; it needs a written response from you describing what you fixed (AWS, 2026).
The mitigation playbook is different per notification type, but the broad shape is consistent. Stop sending to the problem segment, clean the list, document the change in the Support case, and ask AWS to re-evaluate based on mail sent after the fix. AWS will explicitly recalculate the metric using only the post-change mail if you describe the change clearly. For a full walk-through of the diagnostic and recovery steps - including the difference between a hard bounce spike from a bad import versus a recipient-feedback notification - see our Amazon SES deliverability hub.
A practical note on the "representative volume" calculation. Because the window is volume-based rather than time-based, a sudden burst of clean mail will not dilute a bad metric the way it would on a fixed 7-day window. AWS sizes the window so recent behaviour dominates the calculation, but you cannot send your way out of a problem - you have to fix it.
Automating Dashboard Checks With CloudWatch
The dashboard is fine for ad-hoc checks but you do not want to find out about a review by logging into the console. SES publishes the same metrics to CloudWatch under the AWS/SES namespace, so you can alarm on bounce and complaint rates and get paged before AWS does (AWS, 2026). The two metrics that matter are:
Reputation.BounceRate- your account-level hard bounce rate, expressed as a decimal between 0 and 1 (so 0.05 = 5%).Reputation.ComplaintRate- your account-level complaint rate, same units.
A minimal Terraform alarm for the bounce rate at the AWS warning threshold:
resource "aws_cloudwatch_metric_alarm" "ses_bounce_rate_warning" {
alarm_name = "ses-bounce-rate-warning"
comparison_operator = "GreaterThanThreshold"
evaluation_periods = 3
metric_name = "Reputation.BounceRate"
namespace = "AWS/SES"
period = 900
statistic = "Maximum"
threshold = 0.05
alarm_description = "SES bounce rate has crossed 5% - AWS will place the account under review"
alarm_actions = [aws_sns_topic.ses_alerts.arn]
}
In practice you want at least two alarms per metric: one at a self-imposed soft threshold (2% bounce, 0.05% complaint) for early warning, and one at the AWS hard threshold (5% bounce, 0.1% complaint) for incident response. Three evaluation periods of 15 minutes each smooths out spikes from small batches of bounces and prevents pager fatigue.
The same CloudWatch event stream that surfaces these aggregate metrics also publishes per-message events - sends, deliveries, bounces, complaints, opens, clicks - to a configurable destination. That is where you build per-campaign or per-segment monitoring that the account-level dashboard cannot show you. The setup mechanics are covered in our SES event publishing guide.
How Mailblast Surfaces Dashboard Metrics
Mailblast operates on your own Amazon SES account (BYO-SES), so the Reputation Dashboard belongs to you and AWS, not to Mailblast. The actual numbers, the actual review cases, the actual sending pauses all originate in your AWS account and Mailblast cannot influence them. Mailblast pulls the same source data the SES API exposes (account-level send statistics, bounce events, complaint events) and surfaces it in the campaign dashboard. You see the trend lines without context-switching to the AWS console.
The operationally useful piece is alerting. Mailblast tracks per-campaign bounce and complaint rates as messages are sent. It pauses a campaign automatically if the rate climbs past your configured thresholds, well before the account-level rolling number AWS sees crosses the review band. This is the difference between "AWS placed your account under review" and "Mailblast paused this segment at 3% bounce, here is what to clean up." For the underlying mechanics of how Mailblast wires SES events back into campaign-level dashboards, see the SES event publishing guide referenced above.
FAQ
What is the Amazon SES Reputation Dashboard?
The Reputation Dashboard is the Reputation metrics page in the SES console that shows account-level Bounce Rate, Complaint Rate, and an overall Account status (Healthy, Under review, Sending paused, etc.). It is the same data the Amazon SES team sees when evaluating account health (AWS, 2026). It is free, available on every SES account, and distinct from the paid Virtual Deliverability Manager add-on.
What bounce rate is too high for Amazon SES?
AWS recommends a bounce rate below 5% (AWS, 2026). At 5% or higher, AWS automatically places the account under review. At 10% or higher, AWS may pause the account's ability to send. The safe operating band most senders aim for is below 2%, which leaves headroom for a bad list segment without crossing the review threshold.
What complaint rate triggers an SES review?
AWS recommends a complaint rate below 0.1% (AWS, 2026). At 0.1% or higher, AWS automatically places the account under review. At 0.5% or higher, AWS may pause the account's ability to send. Aim for under 0.05% in normal operation; that band is well below the review threshold and consistent with sustained good engagement.
Is the SES Reputation Dashboard the same as Virtual Deliverability Manager?
No. The Reputation Dashboard is the free, always-on Reputation metrics page that surfaces account-level bounce and complaint rates plus your sending status. Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM) is an optional paid SES feature that adds per-ISP insights, configuration advice, inbox placement testing, and a separate dashboard with global deliverability data (AWS, 2026).
How is the SES bounce and complaint rate calculated?
AWS calculates both metrics over a 'representative volume' of recent mail that varies by sender and adjusts as sending patterns change (AWS, 2026). It is not a fixed 24-hour or 7-day window. Hard bounces and recipient-reported complaints count; soft bounces, bounces to verified addresses, and inbox-simulator mail do not.
Disclosure: Mailblast is a hosted management layer for your own Amazon SES account. The Reputation Dashboard, review cases, and sending status all live inside your AWS account; Mailblast surfaces the same metrics and pauses campaigns before account-level thresholds are crossed.