Email "Bounce"

Emma222 · Aug 17, 2009

Hello,

I just got my Mac and have a question. Never have owned one before. I was excited to see the function in Apple Mail that will "bounce" email. Tested it by having someone send an email to me. I selected the email and hit the "bounce" button. The email immediately went to my "trash" as it was supposed to. A box popped up asking if this is what I want to do and that the sender will receive it back with a message saying it was sent to the wrong address. BUT, the sender did NOT receive the return "bounce" notification. We tried it four different times but never got the bounce back.

Any suggestions? Other than that, I am SO happy I switched!

zacharace · Aug 17, 2009

Welcome to the Light Side!

Do you have another personal email account you can test it with? Sometimes that "just works," for lack of a better term. Other than that, I can't think of why it wouldn't send, although I'm not too familiar with Mail's bounce function.

technologist · Aug 17, 2009

Emma222 said:
Hello,

I just got my Mac and have a question. Never have owned one before. I was excited to see the function in Apple Mail that will "bounce" email. Tested it by having someone send an email to me. I selected the email and hit the "bounce" button. The email immediately went to my "trash" as it was supposed to. A box popped up asking if this is what I want to do and that the sender will receive it back with a message saying it was sent to the wrong address. BUT, the sender did NOT receive the return "bounce" notification. We tried it four different times but never got the bounce back.

Any suggestions? Other than that, I am SO happy I switched!

Some email providers may block the bounce notifications. Others may delay the bounce notification while they try re-sending; check back in a while.

Usually, you only bounce spam messages or those from abusive senders.

Emma222 · Aug 17, 2009

Thanks for the welcome and the suggestions. We tried sending one from a different account and it did the same thing. We bounced it, the email went to the trash, but the account we sent it from never received a bounced notification. Technologist, you could very well be correct, that AT&T blocked the bounce. We did the test this morning, so would assume we would have received the bounced notification by now. Will let you know if it ever comes through. Very nice place this is to get help!

PapaNoHair · Aug 18, 2009

I did the same thing and no notification came back either. Odd.

chscag · Aug 18, 2009

PapaNoHair said:
I did the same thing and no notification came back either. Odd.

Nowadays, most ISPs will not bounce email due to the extreme heavy amount of SPAM that exists throughout the system. Instead, they'll send it to never - never land or the trash. Also bouncing mail from individuals will seem to them the same as SPAMMING or virus activity.

Incorrect address notification is still provided by most, however, even that is becoming a thing of the past.

Regards.

Emma222 · Aug 18, 2009

Thank you both for the responses. chscag that certainly sounds correct. I'll forget about that feature for sure. There are enough things on this Mac I have to learn to keep me busy for a looong time.

Konan · Aug 18, 2009

Bouncing is BAD BAD BAD. A bounce will never get back to a spammer - it just becomes more spam. Fortunately, most of the Internet sysadmins now know better than to enable or propagate bounces, which is probably why yours isn't getting through. That is a blessing for all of us.

Here is a scenerio. You have a web site on some rented server, like millions of folks do. It may be a hobby page, for a small business, or anything. Then one day, some scumbag uses your address for a spam run and sends out several millon messages advertising something that nobody wants using YOUR address. Since the TO: address he uses are computer generated or off of some old spam address list, most of them are invalid. And, since the Internet thinks you have sent the message(s), YOU, not the spammer, are going to get the bounces that say something like "The address you used is invalid". So tomorrow morning when you check your mail, there are tens of thousand of bounce messages filling it up. Then as you clear those, thousands of more will arrive, along with angry messages from some users who think that you actually sent the spam.

I have had it happen to me at least three times, and to some of my customers all the time. Once it was when I was still on dial up to my server, and had to handle all that junk at about 30k bps. About 10 years back the bounce problem was so great that some otherwise legimate web sites would be blacklisted just to slow down the incoming junk.

Again, fortunately, most of the bouncing is now turned off at the domain level.

Konan

dtravis7 · Aug 18, 2009

I tried it two ways. First from my Gmail account to my AT&T Yahoo. Then hit bounce and it showed the bounced message right away on Gmail.

Went the other way and when I bounced it from Gmail to AT&T 2 times it did not show. Reason is AT&T Yahoo is putting it in the Spam folder so your email client will not download it. I logged in the Web Interface at Yahoo and there they both were in the Junk folder.

And I never bounce to a Spammer. That will never work. Just to some people I know when they say insulting stuff to get their attention and trust me, it does every time.

Emma222 · Aug 18, 2009

Thank you both. Konan...these are personal emails from people I care not to write too. I never bounce to a spammer...this is a totally different scenario.

Thanks dtravis7 for trying that out. We tried it several different ways. I'll go muck around in the junk mail on yahoo and see if I find them. It's not a big problem but sure would be a nice feature if it worked....No more annoying emails from people I barely remember...;-)

PapaNoHair · Aug 18, 2009

Thanks for that info. So what is the best way to handle spam?

dtravis7 · Aug 18, 2009

PapaNoHair said:
Thanks for that info. So what is the best way to handle spam?

Papa, most of my Spam gets zapped before it ever gets into Mail by Yahoo's spam filter. If some leaks into mail, I login to my AT&T Yahoo page and mark it as Spam and it never shows again. Google Mails Spam filter works great also.

Emma222 · Aug 19, 2009

Well, I checked my AT&T Yahoo account tonight and the four bounced emails were indeed in the spam folder, but at least the function works. I have another problem now but will post it in a separate thread. Thank you all so much for the help!

baggss · Aug 19, 2009

Konan said:
Bouncing is BAD BAD BAD. A bounce will never get back to a spammer - it just becomes more spam. Fortunately, most of the Internet sysadmins now know better than to enable or propagate bounces, which is probably why yours isn't getting through. That is a blessing for all of us.

Here is a scenerio. You have a web site on some rented server, like millions of folks do. It may be a hobby page, for a small business, or anything. Then one day, some scumbag uses your address for a spam run and sends out several millon messages advertising something that nobody wants using YOUR address. Since the TO: address he uses are computer generated or off of some old spam address list, most of them are invalid. And, since the Internet thinks you have sent the message(s), YOU, not the spammer, are going to get the bounces that say something like "The address you used is invalid". So tomorrow morning when you check your mail, there are tens of thousand of bounce messages filling it up. Then as you clear those, thousands of more will arrive, along with angry messages from some users who think that you actually sent the spam.

I have had it happen to me at least three times, and to some of my customers all the time. Once it was when I was still on dial up to my server, and had to handle all that junk at about 30k bps. About 10 years back the bounce problem was so great that some otherwise legimate web sites would be blacklisted just to slow down the incoming junk.

Again, fortunately, most of the bouncing is now turned off at the domain level.

Konan

I've had that exact thing happen to me. In the end, the IPs of my host were added to a major blacklist and I had trouble just sending e-mail from my domain or to my domain addresses. It was a simple fix really, I went with a more reputable host and things have been fine since.

Email "Bounce"

Emma222

zacharace

technologist

Emma222

PapaNoHair

chscag

Well-known member

Emma222

Konan

dtravis7

Emma222

PapaNoHair

dtravis7

Emma222

baggss

Shop Amazon