aws ses inbound e-mail to S3 and SNS topic

Question

It might not be the best question but I am really lost here

I am in the EU(Ireland) zone. I want to configure aws ses to receive my e-mails and forward them to an SNS topic and save them in an S3 bucket. I use route53 as my nameserver.

What I did so far

SES

• setup and verified my domain: example.com
  • added the spf and dkim records to the ns records (aws did it automatically)
  • enabled the dkim
  • setup the admin SNS topic for bounce/delivery/complaint notification
• verified a couple of e-mail addresses
• smtp setup
  • created IAM users for smtp and saved the credentials
• setup the Rule sets (the only rule in the active ruleset http://prntscr.com/8tg0us)
  • enabled, no tls, enable spam and virus scan
  • recipients: 2 records - example.com and .example.com
  • action
    • S3 bucket example-mail
    • sns topic - example
• setup ip address filters: just in case with 0.0.0.0/0 and allow to make sure the it doesn't perform any ip filtering
• requested a send limit increase to move out of sandbox environment

S3

• created the example-mail bucket
• created the bucket policy: from the guide

SNS

• setup the example topic, subscribed my e-mail address and verified the subscriptioni
• created the admin topic with verified e-mail address

And the problem

When I send an e-mail to user86@example.com nothing happens. No mail in S3 nor SNS message. If I change the recipients to info@example.com and send the mail to user86@example.com then the mail bounces.

I tested the smtp with msmtp and outlook and it works fine so the SES is capable of receiving my e-mails on smtp level but it seems that after smtp did it's part everything goes to /dev/null and the e-mails do not reach the rule sets. Nothing comes to the admin topic. In the cloudWatch I should have an SES metric but I have none.

Any idea ? I am really stuck :(

Answer 1

Final answer capturing all the comments above:

You normally use SES to send emails. When sending email it's the Amazon AWS SES email servers that are used.

When receiving emails you are using whatever server you have configured as your email server for the domain. This means that in your setup for incoming e-mails they don't go through SES.

To make them go through SES and implicitly have the rule you've configured above fire, you need to point the DNS MX record for your domain to the SES endpoint in the region you want to use to receive emails.

See: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-receive-and-process-incoming-email-with-amazon-ses/