The AWS SES docs list schemas for delivery, bounce and complaint notifications. Every notification also includes a mail object which includes the original SES-generated id (messageId) and recipient email addresses (destination).
One kind of bounceType/bounceSubType combination is "Permanent"/"NoEmail":
It was not possible to retrieve the recipient email address from the bounce message.
This is confusing. SES sends the messageId, so it should know which is the email in question.
My assumption is this applies to a specific scenario: the original email was sent to multiple recipients (e.g. a newsletter), but the bounce was for a specific one, and SES cannot infer which. In which case I also couldn't infer the offending email address.
I'm new to SES so I want to know if this is indeed the case.
"so it should know which is the email in question." You'll not SendEmail and friends can send one message to multiple destinations but returns one message id. Thus a bounce message is an active response on the part of the receiving MTA. If it's delivered to multiple recipients on the same MTA, but the MTA bounces one without specifying the destination, SES has no way to know which.
If however you only send to one address at a time, you can deduce that any message ID maps to one recipient. It costs more money to do it this way but often folks only have one recipient anyway.