Bounce Unwanted Email With Mail.app
Posted October 21th, 2006

From the day I received my MacBook Pro, I've been using Mail.app, and the experience has been great. I love being able to just glance at Mail's icon to see if I have new email, and I love not having to load Gmail to read those emails. Using .Mac with Mail, everything just works.

Since dumping Gmail, however, there have been no instances where I've found a feature in Mail that Gmail doesn't have. If anything, there were features Gmail had that I started to miss, such as being able to send and receive emails from another email alias, despite the fact you can create aliases with .Mac, and send and receive with them. That's starting to change. I stumbled upon something that I haven't seen elsewhere - the ability to bounce emails.

To be able to bounce emails in Mail.app, go to the View menu, and select "Customize Toolbar...". From there, you can rearrange, replace and add icons to Mail's top menu. Add the "Bounce To Sender" option to your menu, wherever you please, and click "Done". From there, you can bounce emails back to their sender at your leisure, by simply selecting the email and clicking the nice button.

So lets say that you've got an email in your Inbox that you would like to bounce. Select the email, in Mail.app, and click bounce. A message will pop up, asking if you're sure you want to bounce the email. Click OK, and the email will disappear from your inbox. From there, the person that sent you the email that you bounced will see a new email in their inbox. The email will read something like the following:

The original message was received at 2006-10-21 17:42:37 -0500 from postoffice.local [10.0.0.1] ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors ----- -----Transcript of session follows ----- ... while talking to postoffice.local.: >>> RCPT To: < << 550 5.1.1 unknown or illegal alias: [email protected] 550 ... User unknown Final-Recipient: RFC822; [email protected] Action: failed Status: 5.1.1 Remote-MTA: DNS; postoffice.local Diagnostic-Code: SMTP;550 5.1.1 unknown or illegal alias: [email protected] Last-Attempt-Date: 2006-10-21 17:42:37 -0500 ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Winnopeg To: [email protected] Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2006 17:39:11 -0500 Subject: Test This is a bounce test.

By bouncing emails from senders that you don't want, you're discouraging that person to email you again. If they send an email to you, and they get an email back saying it wasn't received, chances are they're going to figure something's wrong with the address and not send another. Where would this come in handy? Well, where do you think it would come in handy? Perhaps you get a lot of spam from companies that won't let you unsubscribe? Maybe someone found your email address and sent you an email, but you want nothing to do with that person? You be the judge.

Of course, bouncing received emails isn't perfect. If you bounce a spam email, but that email was sent from a fake email address, you're just going to get another email in your inbox saying that the bounced message couldn't be delivered. For the most part, though, this could very well come in handy for a lot of people.