NB: I'm an AWS noob.
I followed the instructions to set up SES receiving (no sending needed) for my domain to write incoming emails to an S3 bucket. The domain is managed through Route 53 & verified (as per https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/receiving-email-getting-started-verify.html), the MX & TXT records are set up (used endpoint inbound-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com as per https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/regions.html), I set up a receipt rule (as per https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/receiving-email-getting-started-receipt-rule.html) for admin@ (plus several other email addresses like postmaster@, hostmaster@, administrator@, etc), let SES set up the bucket permissions & confirmed them on the bucket (as per https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/receiving-email-permissions.html). Not using encryption, spam/virus filtering or IP address filtering. Rule set is enabled. I got the original message from Amazon (AMAZON_SES_SETUP_NOTIFICATION) in my bucket.
Everything appears to be configured correctly, but I receive no emails in the S3 bucket. No errors, nothing in CloudWatch (not even a means to monitor SES), no bounces, nothing.
Any ideas?
Best Answer
I stumbled upon your question because I had the same issue of not receiving mails despite totally correct setup in SES.
However, in my case I didn't use Route 53 but registered the domain on another hosting service, including the DNS settings, especially the MX records. Looking in the DNS entries I've found that the priorities in the MX records were wrong, still pointing to my "old" mail server. The SES entry had lower priority which explained that no mails were sent to SES.
Solution was to change MX entry priorities, having a higher priority for the SES server.
Note, that this does not apply to your case since you used Route 53 for DNS setup, and should only be mentioned as another possible error source.