Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Bounce select emails from junk folder on TB

  • 3 cavab
  • 0 have this problem
  • 2 views
  • Last reply by Matt

more options

I have returned to TB after a very long absence. I have v.102.8.0 on Windows 7. TB list of Email accounts are Yahoo, Hotmail, GMX and Gmail. Primary is Yahoo and I receive copious amounts of junk mails through Yahoo. Is there a way to bounce as "undeliverable" to select senders from the junk folder?

I have returned to TB after a very long absence. I have v.102.8.0 on Windows 7. TB list of Email accounts are Yahoo, Hotmail, GMX and Gmail. Primary is Yahoo and I receive copious amounts of junk mails through Yahoo. Is there a way to bounce as "undeliverable" to select senders from the junk folder?

All Replies (3)

more options

Not to my knowledge. However, there is a program, Mailwasher, that is free when use for just one account, and it has the capability to bounce unwanted messages. I use it myself.

more options

Hello David, thank you for taking the time to respond. I tried Mailwash, it does have the option to bounce for emails located in inbox but I cannot find a way to deal with Junk. I am hesitant to mark junk as not junk but I will try and see if that works. Thanks again!

more options

I wonder why anyone wants to bounce junk, or any other mail that has already been accepted for delivery.

I know there are some products that claim to do so. They are also logically flawed in that the bounce comes way after the server accepts the mail for delivery. Email, despite what some folk think is mostly automated. So when you send an email to a server for delivery and ask it to deliver mail for XXX@somedomain. The first thing the server does, after deciding if it is accepting mail from that server address, is to check the user exists and refuse to accept the mail is the user does not exist or issue a bounce. Right then, not in a few minutes time, let alone hours.

So the "bounce" that comes in hours after the mail was accepted, unless it is a delayed delivery notice, is clearly some sort of fake. Either from mailwasher or it's ilk, or perhaps generated by malware using your address to send SPAM. To be ignored regardless as a spurious message if you are a spammer. If you are a commercial marketer, you might take a little notice, but you will not place much faith in old or delayed bounce messages.

Then there is the primary reason "bouncing" is bad, and that is true spammers rarely use their own email address. They tend to use addresses harvested from social media Ipso facto the sender that gets this "bounce" has never heard of you and has no idea what you are on about. They are generally confused as they have never even heard of backscatter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_(email) and resent receiving it. They might even report you as a spammer.

Then there is the reality that spammers also generally do not monitor failure to deliver. They send out millions, or even billions of emails knowing only a very small percentage of those will ever get to a humans eyeballs. That small percentage is enough to pay their bills, that is all they care about. Mostly they don't see the bounces anyway.

Through fake or "borrowed" from: addresses and sometime using unsecured relay servers, they are largely invisible to the average user and sometime even forensic analysis is difficult as they also include faked headers to obfuscate the true source of the email. So your laborious manual process of sending backscatter to someone that really is not involved is not productive going forward, but could well see your address or server reported for the unsolicited bounce messages (most commercial servers no longer issue them routinely because they are a source of having your server blacklisted for sending SPAM). Remember SPAM is simply unsolicited email.

Then there is the final issue, SPAM is generally unwanted email. But unwanted email is not all SPAM. If you subscribed to it it is not SPAM. Many of the folk I see here talking about SPAM actually are talking about unwanted email from commercial entities they subscribed to. This is not SPAM. It is the commercial relationship between you and the owner of the web site to provide you access. In this scenario, they man act on bounces by simply terminating web site access as your address no longer exists.

If you don't want this commercial email, unsubscribe, close your account on the web site or block all email from the domain with a rule. But it is not SPAM, don't try and treat it as such.

Interestingly, I have accounts with all of the providers you mentioned and by far the one delivering the most SPAM is Yahoo and this has been the case for most of the last 25 years. They have done a rather poor job with SPAM, even Hotmail does better, and they used to back down to anyone that threatened to sue them for treating their mail as SPAM. Such is the US legal system apparently