I finally figured this out. Kinda silly oversight really. I had set up my MAIL FROM domain in Amazon as mail.blah.com but in Apple I was only verifying email(a)blah.com As soon as I added email(a)mail.blah.com the emails were delivered.

this should say: and the actual Mail From address will be something like: random_uuid @ example.com in my developer account I have added example.com, and the actual email address I use to send from. For example: news @ example.com