AWS SES is treating vacation responder as bounce

Question

We use aws server and our application sends emails to customers via Amazon's Simple Email Service (SES).

When recipients turn on vacation responder, SES treats them as bounces and blocks that email id after few sends.

Is this a standard problem of SES or I am missing something? Any help would be appreciated.

This is how my PHP code is sending email via ses

define( 'AWSAccessKeyId', $this->SNS_Access_Key_Id );
define( 'AWSSecretKey', $this->SNS_Secret_Key_Id );

$transport = Swift_AWSTransport::newInstance( AWSAccessKeyId, AWSSecretKey );
$transport->setDebug( true ); 

$mailer = Swift_Mailer::newInstance( $transport );

$message = Swift_Message::newInstance()
                ->setSubject( $email_subject )
                ->setFrom( array( $from_email_id ) )
                ->setTo( $to_email_id_array ) 
                ->setBody( $email_body, 'text/html' );

$response = $mailer->send( $message ); 

Answer 1

My googling gave some relevant sources for you:

You are notified of out-of-the-office (OOTO) messages through the same method as bounces, although they don't count toward your bounce statistics. To see an example of an OOTO bounce notification, you can use the Amazon SES mailbox simulator.

Using Notifications with Amazon SES

Bounce — The recipient's ISP rejects your email with an SMTP 550 5.1.1 response code ("Unknown User"). Amazon SES generates a bounce notification and sends it to you via email or by using an Amazon SNS notification, depending on how you set up your system. This mailbox simulator email address will not be placed on the Amazon SES suppression list as one normally would when an email hard bounces. The bounce response that you receive from the mailbox simulator is compliant with RFC 3464.

Testing Amazon SES Email Sending

Amazon SES has an understanding of the different reasons messages bounce. If SES detects a hard bounce, it will add the address to a temporary "blacklist". I believe "out of office" messages will not be counted as bounces. They will be forwarded to you but not show up as a bounce.

"Bounce", defined - AWS forum