SES stores nothing. Your list is whatever table your application reads before calling SendEmail, and its quality is entirely a property of your own schema and your own signup validation.
Getting the addresses out of Amazon SES
SES holds no contact list, so the export is from your own database. The suppression list can be exported through the API for reconciliation.
Before the first send, without exception. The 5% review threshold is measured from your very first messages, so there is no grace period in which a bad list quietly corrects itself.
What Amazon SES does with the file you bring back
The import rules decide what a re-import actually changes, which is worth knowing before you upload.
The short version
- There is no import. Addresses reach SES one send at a time from your application.
- The account-level suppression list can be managed through the API, including bulk additions from your own bounce history.
- Sandbox accounts can only send to verified addresses, which catches a surprising number of teams testing with fake data.
- Dedicated IPs need warming, and a cold IP sending volume looks exactly like the problem SES thresholds exist to catch.
The mistake to avoid
Some addresses come back unresolved, and that is a fact about the receiving server rather than a gap in the check. We label those and never bill for them. What that means, and why roughly 28% of business addresses land there, is set out on our page about catch-all domains.
Questions people ask
How do I clean a list for Amazon SES?
Before it reaches SES. There is no contact list in the product, so the work happens in your own database and at your signup path. Verify the addresses, suppress the failures, and only then send.
Should I verify addresses before a migration onto SES?
Yes, and it is the clearest case for it in this whole category. A 5% threshold with an automatic review means one bad import can put your transactional mail under a sending pause.
What should happen to unknown addresses on SES?
Hold them back from the first sends. You cannot afford unresolved addresses against a 5% ceiling, so send to confirmed addresses first and introduce the rest slowly once your rate has headroom.