A small shop usually sends all its mail through one Amazon SES account: receipts, password resets, the newsletter. SES judges bounces across the whole account, so one stale list imported into the newsletter can take the password resets down with it.

I built Fothering for the AWS CDS Agentic AI Partner Hackathon to stop that. The name comes from seamanship. Fothering a ship means drawing a sail under the hull over a leak so she can keep going, and it's how HMS Endeavour got off the Great Barrier Reef in June 1770.

## What it does

Each kind of mail goes through its own SES configuration set, and SES publishes each set's events to EventBridge. Fothering keeps a minimized copy of every event (the recipient's domain and a keyed hash, never the address, expiring after 30 days) and looks at every lane every five minutes.…