On sending test for mailing, I get : "Could not identify any recipients. Perhaps your test group is empty..."

Question

I'm setting up civicrm-5.47.2-wordpress with wordpress-5.9.2 on Ubuntu 20.04 running Cyberpanel 2.1, on AWS Lightsail with AWS SES SMTP credentials in CiviCRM Outbound email where 'Save & Send Test Email' works. I can also send individual email to contacts.

But when I create a draft mailing and use 'Send test email to:' or 'Send test email to group', it tells me it is sent, but then I get the "Could not identify any recipients. Perhaps your test group is empty..." message. It also marks those contacts as 'On hold'. (But I can unset the 'On hold' and email individually from CiviCRM.)

There are no clues in ConfigAndLog.

I can't seem to debug this issue. Need some help please.

Answer 1

After setting Enable Debugging, ConfigAndLog showed this error :

code: 554, response: Message rejected: Email address is not verified. The following identities failed the check in region US-EAST-1: [email protected]

SOLUTION (in my case) was to make sure that my bounce account [email protected] had the same domain-part setting as my SES-verified domain (mydomain.ca). SES was rejecting mydomain.com (not verified). To clarify, the bounce account is elsewhere, but the "Email address domain (the part after @)" is set to mydomain.ca which is a verified domain in SES.

After making this change, the "Could not identify any recipients. Perhaps your test group is empty..." message vanished and a test mailing was received by all 17 contacts in the Test group.