How to get Amazon SES to forward bounce emails

I'm not sure if anyone else is still struggling with this, but I think some things have changed since this thread was originally posted. Due to the rise in popularity of Sendy and SES with XenForo administrators, there might be a lot more people out there who have this problem but don't yet realize it.

I didn't realize I had a problem until I noticed the "Email Bounce Log" in my XF admin panel had not recorded any recent bounces. I have a large forum that sends thousands of emails a day and I typically have several bounces a day, so I knew something was up. I checked my dedicated XenForo bounce email address, and it hadn't received any emails for months. Sure enough, the last one was received on the same day I installed and configured Sendy.

There is no longer a step 7, lol.

This is what got me. There is no longer a Step 7 because Sendy now does that for you. You can still see what happens in these steps here in their old instructions. Basically, Sendy configures SES to send SNS notifications, and then adds some SNS notifications that call back to Sendy when you have a bounce. It would also appear that Sendy disables the "Email Feedback Forwarding" option in SES (even though it doesn't show this in the screenshots, I think it does it... I know I certainly didn't turn that off myself), which is the feature that is responsible for sending the bounces that XenForo uses.

So, it's an easy fix: just go into your SES control panel in AWS, go to Domains > yourdomain.com, then expand the Notification section. Click "Edit Configuration" and set "Email Feedback Forwarding" to Enabled.

That's it. You should now receive both SNS notifications that Sendy can use, and bounce emails that XenForo can use. I think this will also have the effect of de-activating the accounts of any registered users who you also have on any Sendy lists. I'm not sure if it will work the other way around, though — that depends on how Sendy parses the data it gets from the SNS notification.

Everyone who uses Sendy and SES should check their accounts to make sure this is not happening to them as well. It breaks the XenForo bounced email handling and could affect the standing of your SES account and the deliverability of your emails as the software does not respond automatically to these reports as you expect.
 
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