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How to Test Bounce Management in Mautic with Amazon SES/SNS

You know how critical it is to ensure your emails actually reach your audience. But what happens when they don't?

This is where bounce management comes into play. This flag leads that reject your emails (e.g., because of a full inbox, invalid email address, or even a spam report 😱) as Do Not Contact.

How do you know that this really happens? If you want to make sure it does, you can test it easily, if you use Amazon SES/SNS.

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Mautic 5 does NOT support bounce handling via Amazon SNS out of the box anymore. You either need to install a plugin or have to use monitored inboxes for bounce management.
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The test email addresses below only work if you email them via Amazon SES in some way (API, SMTP, etc.).

If you came here, but don't use Amazon SES you can try sending an email to bouncetest@tribulant.com. This is the only email address I know that gives you a bounce. It answers with a :fail: 550 No such person at this address.

Why Bounce Management Matters

First off, why should you even care?

Bounce management helps you maintain a healthy email list by removing addresses that caused an issue after emailing them.

Those issues could be:

  1. Hard bounce: This is permanent issues like a non-existent email (e.g. a lead misspelling their email address).
  2. Soft bounce: These are temporary issues like a full inbox, an email that is too big, or a server issue at email provider's server.
  3. Complaint: The email was delivered correctly but flagged as spam by the recipient (or automatically by the email provider).

If you don't react to bounces you will harm your deliverability and sender reputation.

Too many bounces? You might just find yourself blacklisted.

Additionally, if you're using Amazon SES to send your emails, and you get too many bounces/complaints, then Amazon will suspend your account.

Luckily, it's quite easy to test proper bounce management.

How to Test Your Bounce Management Set-Up

Amazon SES provides two dedicated test email addresses to test your bounce management.

This means you can send emails to those email addresses and test how well your Mautic installation handles failures without the risk of damaging your reputation.

Email Addresses for Bounce Management Tests

The two email addresses that Amazon SES provides are:

  • bounce@simulator.amazonses.com for bounces – it simulates an SMTP 550 5.1.1 "Unknown User" response. This is like a misspelled or non-existent email address.
  • complaint@simulator.amazonses.com for complaints – it simulates a recipient marking your email as spam.

How to Test Mautic's Bounce Handling

Testing the bounce management is quite easy using those two email addresses. It's three simple steps:

  1. Create a new contact in Mautic with one of the simulator emails.
  2. Send a test email to this new contact.
  3. Check the Result: If your bounce or complaint management setup is correct, Mautic should automatically flag this contact with a “Do Not Contact: Email” status. Give this process a couple of minutes.

If you want or have to run multiple tests without resetting everything, just append +label to the simulator email (e.g., bounce+test1@simulator.amazonses.com).

This lets you simulate different scenarios or tests without overlap.

You can find more information about this on the Amazon docs:

Sending test emails in Amazon SES with the simulator - Amazon Simple Email Service
Send an email to yourself from the Amazon SES console for the easiest way to experiment with sending emails using Amazon SES.
Amazon Simple Email Service

Happy Marketing!

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