Post-Mortem: How Grinches Stole My SES Quota (And How I Got It Back)

Between November 4th and November 6th, the Secret Santa app was targeted by a bot network that decided to use my infrastructure to send roughly 3,000 emails per minute. The result? My bounce rate exploded, my AWS bill twitched, and Amazon (rightfully) threw my Simple Email Service (SES) account into the loony bin.