I actually had the same issue getting rejected for SES since I didn't have any reputation or something and ended up re-implementing the SES (and SNS) api for us

I actually had the same issue getting rejected for SES since I didn't have any reputation or something and ended up re-implementing the SES (and SNS) api for use with a regular IMAP/SMTP server, I intended to clean it up and open-source it but never got to it.