Ghost tries to send an email from a subscribers email address

I set up AWS SES for sending mail from a self-hosted Ghost instance with a following configuration:

"mail": {
    "transport": "SMTP",
    "options": {
      "host": "email-smtp.us-west-1.amazonaws.com",
      "port": 465,
      "service": "SES",
      "auth": {
        "user": "USER-ACCESS",
        "pass": "USER-SECRET"
      }
    }

and it works well when I’m trying to subscribe with an address from my own domain which is verified in AWS SES console, but when I’m trying to subscribe with a different email address, it shows this error:

Failed to send email. Reason: Message failed: 554 Message rejected: Email address is not verified. The following identities failed the check in region US-WEST-1: test@gmail.com.

what am I doing wrong?

I’ve seen that occur when your not graduated out of the SES sandbox. Since as you know due to spam abuse - in the sandbox both the from and to address must be verified ahead of time. Is your SES account in production mode?

1 Like

Thank you for a suggestion! Trying to get into the production mode of AWS SES to confirm or deny this hypothesis. :raised_hands:

Hey, @iBotPeaches! I was wondering, what did you tell AWS SES in order to get production access? I was trying to explain them all of my use cases and how Ghost helps manage bounces and email lists, but they still rejected my application.

I don’t remember except a ton of legal/compliance questions that we got answered from another team at work. Our account also had like 10 other AWS services so the account looked pretty real and established so I figured thats why we got approved.

@iBotPeaches thank you for the reply! I decided to switch from AWS SES to Mailgun and it works perfectly now. Thank you for helping me here :raised_hands: