Amazon SES · Rate Limits

Amazon Ses Rate Limits

Amazon SES enforces two sending limits per account per region — a 24-hour recipient quota and a maximum send rate — plus roughly twenty structural service quotas on identities, tenants, configuration sets, templates and receipt rules. Sandbox accounts are capped at 200 recipients/day and 1/second; production limits are use-case dependent and rise with reputation. SES publishes no rate-limit response headers: exhaustion surfaces as ThrottlingException (HTTP 400) or SMTP 454, and remaining headroom must be polled with GetAccount.

Amazon Ses Rate Limits is the machine-readable rate-limit profile for Amazon SES on the APIs.io network, conforming to the API Commons Rate Limits specification.

It captures 24 rate-limit definitions, measuring emails_per_day, emails_per_second, bytes, recipients, and destinations.

The profile also includes response codes documented for throttled_api, throttled_api_exception, throttled_service_exception, throttled_smtp, and serviceUnavailable.

Tagged areas include Rate Limiting, Email, SES, and Quotas.

24 Limits
Rate LimitingEmailSESQuotas

Limits

24-hour sending quota (sandbox) account/region
emails_per_day · day
200
Counted by RECIPIENT, not by message. Sandbox accounts may only send to verified addresses or the mailbox simulator.
Sending rate (sandbox) account/region
emails_per_second · second
1
24-hour sending quota (production) account/region
emails_per_day · day
variable
AWS publishes no fixed starting number. The quotas page states the limit "varies based on your specific use case" once out of the sandbox, and rises automatically as reputation stays healthy. Read the current value with GetAccount.
Sending rate (production) account/region
emails_per_second · second
variable
Same as above — use-case dependent, read with GetAccount.
Maximum message size (SES v2 API and SMTP) message
bytes
40 MB after base64 encoding
Messages over 10 MB are subject to bandwidth throttling, as low as 40 MB/s aggregate.
Maximum message size (SES v1 API) message
bytes
10 MB after base64 encoding
A concrete reason AWS steers senders from v1 to v2.
Recipients per message message
recipients
50
Any To, CC or BCC address counts.
Destinations per templated (bulk) send request
destinations
50
Verified identities account/region
identities
10000
Tenants account/region
tenants
10000
Configuration sets account/region
configuration_sets
10000
Configuration set name length resource
characters
64
Event destinations per configuration set configuration_set
destinations
10
Dimensions per CloudWatch event destination event_destination
dimensions
10
Dedicated IP pools (managed and standard combined) account/region
pools
50
Email templates account/region
templates
20000
Template size template
bytes
500 KB
Receipt rules per rule set rule_set
rules
200
Receipt rule sets per account account
rule_sets
40
Actions per receipt rule rule
actions
10
Recipients per receipt rule rule
recipients
500
IP address filters per account account
filters
100
Inbound email size stored to S3 message
bytes
40 MB
Inbound email size published to SNS message
bytes
150 KB
Headers alone are capped at 10 KB over SNS and 50 KB to a Lambda function.

Sources