AWS SES Complaint events are not received for GMAIL users
08:52 22 Dec 2025

I want to handle user complaints by performing some business actions when such complaints occurre. I also want to differentiate email campaign by custom tags since I send quite a lot of different purpose emails. For now I do receive complaint events for yahoo & outlook user, however the gmail ones are not received :(

I have the following setup:

  1. An email that is sent along with X-SES-CONFIGURATION-SET header being set to the name of the configuration set in AWS

  2. An event destination created belonging to the configuration set and pointing to SNS Topic

  3. An SNS Topic

  4. A Topic Subscription that is configured to send payload to HTTPS endpoint

  5. Finally an API enpoint that processes the events

What's interesting about the situation is the fact that I have a legacy setup (the one I am migrating from) which looks like this:

  1. An SES Identity that has sends Feedback Notifications to the same SNS Topic

  2. One more topic suscription that is configured to send payload to SQS

  3. A custom cron task that fetches stuff from SQS and performs some business actions on the complained users

And it does work for gmail. I have decided to go via configuration set as the legacy approach seems to be missing the custom tags. (Although I am starting to think that having "Include original email headers" checkbox enabled will fix that)

Please, help me figure out why the gmail user complaints are not received while I am testing the legacy approach with the said checkbox enabled

gmail amazon-sns amazon-ses