Restore bounce to Mail in Lion

You can use Bounce and you will be just another spammer, thanks for letting us know.

That's a bit churlish don't you think - "sticks and stones..." Bouncing has contributed to far less spam for me, so until it's ILLEGAL for a private citizen to do it I will continue.

Of course not, you are the one sending the spam.

I get a trickle of spam and almost all of it is from Pakistan and the UAE. Most of it is actually sent from the actual address or a gmail address.

Solution? Report to Knujon through an AppleScript and bounce.

I get annoying mail from former bosses and family members about politics/religion or anything I told them I do not want to ever hear about. Solution? Bounce.

By saying that you should never bounce email and that this always creates spam, you are ignoring that realities that many of us educated individuals face on a daily basis.

Alex, I made the same obseravation months ago -- still the war wages... there is no emancipating oneself from this debate unless you just do your own thing and let these anti-spam/anti-bounce folks continue with their campaign.

It's futile to even try... you can't "SPAMMER" finish "SPAMMER" a logic"SPAMMER"al argue"SPAMMER"ment with their "SPAMMER" ilk without being labled a "SPAMMER"... we're all just contibuting to the evil spammer empire.

So, using a search engine trying to find out how to bounce mail after upgrading to Mountain Lion, I have come to this helpful discussion. I have skimmed 22 pages of people arguing, but not addressing the question.

Is there a way to bounce mail using Mail in Mountain Lion? If there is not, what is a useful alternative?

I'm not interested in debating the validity of this procedure, only finding out whether or not it is possible. Which is what an ideal support community should do. At least I think that's what it would do.

Ha, that's exactly the frustration I had -- whenever I can identify the sender's address, I simply use redirect and send it back to the originating address.

To bounce, there is a script embedded somewhere in this mess of responses. It worked in Lion and may also work in Mountain Lion but you'll have to comb through all the noise to find it.

Good luck!

PS -- found the script from charrison on or about pg 2...

I couldn't get the script to work the way that Lydie CAMPAN described it, but I did do a slight variation on that method with acceptable results (and no 3rd party software either). Kudos for finding that Applescript can still bounce a message.

1. Open Automator.

2. Create a new service.

3. Configure the service so that it has "no input" in "Mail"

4. Drag "Get Selected Mail Messages" into the workflow

5. Drag "Run Applescript" into the workflow

6. Use the following AppleScript, then save the workflow with a name like "Bounce Message".

on run {input, parameters}

tell application "Mail"

repeat with eachMessage in input

bounceeachMessage

end repeat

end tell

end run

7. In Mail, select the message you would like to bounce. Then from the "Mail" menu, choose "Services", then click on your new service. The message will bounce.

Thanks evrgreen69.

One way to illustrate our viewpoint is to first examine it ourselves. Email has become our conversation mechanism, one where old conversations worth storing can be retrieved.

This is important.

We can discuss something important at work, in our personal lives and these discussions from the past can be retrieved for whatever purpose they are needed for.

Email is our preferred form of communication and storage + retrieval of important conversations of the past.

It is a valuable personal and professional tool.

As emails are conversations, imagine you are discussing with other "friends" how best to proceed on a 6 month plan and why your viewpoint is a correct path and why they should know this. This happens at work all the time and in personal life when you do something like plan to build/buy a house and so on.

It is important to establish a discussion momentum and positive direction.

Now, imagine doing this while walking down a street in NYC with the other friends, and people are constantly butting in to your conversation and loudly trying to sell you fake Rolexes, garbage that you know is not anything you need and garbage that is obviously a complete scam. This interrupts your flow of what you are trying to accomplish, dents your meeting/discussion's momentum, is an invasion on your space and you have no control over making it stop. It's clearly illegal, it's clearly unethical, it's a PITA and it derails you from what you are trying to accomplish. People only do this because they can get away with it and not get caught. It's a blight upon the Internet and the humanity that uses it, as well as a huge tax on the infrastructure of the Internet by raising the cost of doing business.

Without the capability to bounce, every spam message comes with the message of "you are powerless to make this stop and you know we will keep sending these to you. No matter what you have achieved in life, you are powerless to stop us or make sure we are punished for our actions."

This is the unspoken message that a constant barrage of spam delivers to computer users.

Bounce - be it a correct or incorrect method - is the ONLY easily accessible option that I have seen that puts a smidgeon of control back in the hands of the users.

To offer it, to let us use, and then to take it away, insults the user, puts a big EFF EWE in their face as it removes any sense of control over the coarse intrusion that spam can play for people who rely on email.

If spam contains forged headers, there could be a bounce that routes the spam to a spam reporting database and doesn't bounce the email. If the headers are legit, a bounce feature could bounce and not report it as spam into a database. There are better ways to handle this that are better than removing the feature.

The big message here is that a vendor of our preferred OS gave us bounce for what, 10 years(?) and then removed it - and offered nothing as an alternative.

That's an insult to everyone who wanted some sort of control over their own in box. That's removing control and freedom from the user, and that's just a bad way to do business.

Alex Zavatone wrote:

That's removing control and freedom from the user, and that's just a bad way to do business.

You have plenty of options as to where to take your business, exercise them to go to a vendor that suits you, it's a free market.

Actually, here's what I do.

I boot to Snow Leopard.

When I need anything that is Mountain Lion, I run it in a session in VMWare. There is little in Mountain Lion that I need and too many changes to the OS that I strongly dislike. I limit my exposure to it at all costs.

In the past when I tried to make ML a useful OS for me, the solution that evrgreen69 outlined is what I did. It worked well enough and it does work.

Good luck.

Yeah, I do.

And yeah, I have.

I use an OS that doesn't treat me like a child.

I've reverted to Snow Leopard and launch ML only in emulation in VMWare when I need to code in Xcode 4.6. It's a terrible OS with more fluff than function.

And sandboxing? Don't get me started.

Alex Zavatone wrote:

Bounce - be it a correct or incorrect method - is the ONLY easily accessible option that I have seen that puts a smidgeon of control back in the hands of the users.

http://www.georgedillon.com/web/2_bounce_or_not_2_bounce.shtml

2 bounce or not 2 bounce?

The quick answer is... DON'T BOUNCE!

Bouncing spam used to be a good idea, but since the Mimail and Mydoom virii of early 2004 the rules have changed...

In the olden days, circa 2001-2002, when spamming was still an adolescent art, I discovered 'bouncing' as an anti-spam feature of Mailwasher, and heartily recommended that program partly because of that feature. I still recommend the program, but its bouncing feature has lost its shine.

Indeed the fact is that bouncing spam or other unwanted email only worsens the situation for 2 reasons. Firstly it doesn't have any deterrent effect on spammers - on the contrary - by responding at all you run the risk of confirming that your address actually does exist. And secondly the most serious threat to the internet at present is the sheer volume of traffic generated by spam and malware, and bouncing only adds to this problem.

What is bouncing?

When you 'bounce' an e-mail, a message is returned to the sender, as if from your mail server, saying, in effect: "Your message has not been delivered because this email address does not exist".

In those innocent days of 2001-2002 it was thought that spammers were concerned if their list of 10,000 email addresses contained 5% false entries. It was thought that the 'value' of a spammer's database would be reduced if it became stuffed with bogus addresses. So it was logical to assume that bouncing spam would encourage spammers to remove an address from their spam list.

However... the increased speed of computers, and increased availability of broadband have changed the maths. And now our presumptions, in those far off days, of how spammers actually worked seem rather naive.

Now (in February 2004) spammers quite happily send out MILLIONS of emails every hour in the hope, nay in the certainty, that the return will be a success rate of approximately 10... not 10%... but 10 in a Million (0.001 %). With those kind of odds, they just don't care if their database of addresses is 5% or 50% incorrect - the quality of their database is now irrelevant - it has become a sheer weight of numbers game.

So...

Bouncing won't reduce spam... but it gets worse...

Bouncing email can actually have the opposite of the desired effect - it can CONFIRM your email address as valid (not that the spammers give a toss anymore!) for several reasons:

1. A genuine bounce will be sent by your ISP the moment the undeliverable message is received, whereas your 'bounce' from Mailwasher or Pocomail or whichever application you use will be returned after a significant delay. If the spammers do bother filtering bounces, you can be sure that this is a factor they will consider, and that your 'bounce', an hour or more after the message was sent, only confirms that the message WAS delivered but the bounce has been created later by a bouncing application.
   
2. Mailwasher, excellent as it is, does NOT accurately reproduce YOUR ISP's undeliverable mail message. Try it (I have). The bounce message from Mailwasher (or any other application which offers 'bounce' as an option) is not EXACTLY the same as a true bounce from your ISP, and in its own way it is identifiable as coming from the application which created it - and again, you can be sure that any spammer who is paying attention to bounces will be clued in to the tell-tale signature of a bounce from your chosen app.
   
3. Aliases. The bit before the @ sign in an email address is called an 'alias'. It's usual for any email addressed to any alias@yourdomian to be delivered into a 'catch all' mailbox. If you haven't changed it, by default this may be your username@yourdomain.
   So what happens when you bounce a message received in this (default) inbox? Let's say the spammer makes a guess and sends his message to target@yourdomain.com, and you (or your ISP) have things so configured that this is forwarded to catchall@yourdomain.com. The spam arrives and you bounce it... telling the spammer that "Your message to catchall@yourdomain.com could not be delivered because that address doesn't exist..." It's obvious really, isn't it? The spammer (if he's efficient) has a filter set up to scan all replies to their spam for email addresses and a script to check all addresses found in replies against the addresses already contained in his database. When your bounce arrives, claiming that catchall@yourdomain.com is a 'non-deliverable' address the spammer knows he has hit a target. A true bounce would contain the target address, so your bounce message - with the wrong target address - cannot have been generated from your mail server, and so must have been created by you to try to protect a valid email address - and now he knows what that address is.
   So the result of bouncing can be that whereas previously the spammer was just guessing, you have now confirmed the validity of your default address - which is about as bad as it gets.
   
4. Traffic. OK, OK so we've all got broadband so nobody gives a **** about wasting bandwidth anymore... but hold on a second. The biggest threat to the internet currently is the sheer weight of bogus traffic generated by spam and viruses AND by the bouncing of spam and viruses. Bouncing only adds to the merry-go-round of crap.

CONCLUSION: FOR GOD'S SAKE STOP BOUNCING!

This article was prompted by the MIMAIL virus, or rather by the warning messages I received from the antivirus companies before it struck. I subscribe to a number of services which give early warnings of new viruses. On 26th January 2004 I received an urgent warning from Spywareinfo.comregarding the Mimail worm, which contained the following advice:

If you are running an email server with antivirus software that bounces virus infected emails, FOR GOD'S SAKE STOP BOUNCING THEM! You are participating in a denial of service attack by bouncing viruses at people who are not infected. You could even infect them yourself! STOP BOUNCING THEM!

In the past two weeks I have received more than a hundred emails containing either Mimail or Mydoom, and approximately 20% of these have been bounces from servers configured to detect the virus but not to realise that the "from:" address is forged. I recently read an article which suggested that it could take from four to ten years to clean Mimail & Mydoom from all the world's computers, and until that can be done bouncing is only perpetuating and aggravating the problem.

This is a somewhat pointless discussion because the two factions are simply talking past each other, about solving different problems. Clearly bouncing spam indiscriminately is a bad idea, because of the backscatter problem discussed _ad nauseam_. I have personally had the annoyance of receiving hundreds of such bounces when my address (which also currently [and temporarily] serves as a "catchall" for my domain) was spoofed in the "From:" lines of spam messages sent by random spammers.

However, the bounce tool is very useful for rejecting mail when you know where it is actually coming from -- in most cases, a legitimate or semi-legitimate business which has decided to ignore opt-out requests (or never used opt-in mailing lists). It is also useful for rejecting unwanted personal mail from individuals and non-business mailing lists.

I don't favor eliminating a useful tool because some percentage of people will use it badly. The script workaround mentioned in posts above does not work for me because the headers and rejected address in the message body are often not correct, but I do have a means of using a separate Gmail web session to bounce the mail with the From: line of MAILER-DAEMON@[mydomain].com and the appropriate headers and body. it is not intended to fool a professional spammer, but it does work just fine to convince businesses and individuals to stop sending mail to my address(es).

There is no 'Bounce Tool'. Not in OSX or Windows or Mozilla or anywhere else. Only hacks made by other spammers for their eventual benefit.

Pete

Peter - You're missing the point and you replied with a diatribe I don't care about.

The POINT IS that Apple gave us a bounce tool. For a decade. In the minds of the user, if gave the user some control back. Then Apple took it away, and replaced it with NO alternative (I even mentioned one) which is a slap in the face to the loyal users.

That is the point.

And BTW, I'm going to effing bounce my emails.