Amazon WorkMail overview and troubleshooting support

Amazon Workmail is an email and calendar service offered by Amazon Web Services. It allows businesses to manage email infrastructure using the email client of their choice, including Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), Microsoft Outlook, native iOS, and Android applications. 

Infrastructure 

Amazon WorkMail is a configurable email solution that may use a variety of email applications. The guidelines below reflect the use of Amazon SES as the the receiving email application.

Amazon SES has standard spam filtering, virus and malware protections, but it requires each business to set up email receipt rules that manage inbound email. How an individual business configures their receipt rules is determined by their internal policies and desired business outcomes.

It is recommended that any marketer sending email to an Amazon WorkMail customer follow good sending practices to ensure the highest probability of reaching the inbox.

Standard sending best practice guidelines

• Sending Best Practices

Best practice guidelines

• Avoid getting blocklisted: Spam complaints and sending to spam traps are common reasons for getting blocklisted.
  • Use opt-in consent methods. Do not purchase email lists or harvest email addresses from websites as they often contain spam traps and can lead to high spam complaints.
  • Have a list hygiene strategy in place to remove unresponsive subscribers before they become spam traps.
  • Sign up for all available complaint feedback loops and suppress any subscriber that complains.
• Ensure any attachments you send are free from viruses and malware.
• Ensure content is relevant to the intent of the message and does not resemble common spam messages. Content is scanned for spam characteristics unless it is disabled. 
  • Spam characteristics may include:
    • Misspelled words in the subject line or body
    • Asking for personal information
    • Obfuscating your URL
    • Sloppy HTML code resulting in design errors, invalid images, and broken links
  • Everest users should send all emails through Design & Content prior to deployment to identify potential issues.
• Authenticate your email with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
• Do not send email over 40MB.

Troubleshooting guidelines

• Blocklists
  • Ensure your IPs and domains are not listed at Spamhaus.
    • If your IP or domain is listed at Spamhaus, take steps to fix the cause of the listing or you will have difficulty reaching Amazon WorkMail customers.
  • Amazon WorkMail has an internal, global IP blocklist, but it can be overridden by a business using their internal account-level allowlist settings.
    
    • There isn't a process to get delisted from Amazon's global IP blocklist.
    • If you have an established relationship with a business and you are getting blocked, after checking Spamhaus, contact the business directly to have your email address or IP added to their internal allowlist.
• Check your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication results in Everest using the Authentication-Results header and ensure they all have a pass verdict.
  • If you see anything other than "Pass", check the verdict results page for more information.
    • Verdict Results
• Check your SMTP bounce messages for clues on why your email is not reaching a recipient. Not all businesses will send bounce messages.
  • Common codes (per Amazon SES Developer Guide):
    • Mailbox Does Not Exist— SMTP Reply Code = 550, SMTP Status Code = 5.1.1
    • Message Too Large— SMTP Reply Code = 552, SMTP Status Code = 5.3.4
    • Mailbox Full— SMTP Reply Code = 552, SMTP Status Code = 5.2.2 
    • Message Content Rejected— SMTP Reply Code = 500, SMTP Status Code = 5.6.1 
    • Unknown Failure— SMTP Reply Code = 554, SMTP Status Code = 5.0.0 
    • Temporary Failure— SMTP Reply Code = 450, SMTP Status Code = 4.0.0