Ask Slashdot: Spoof an Email Bounce With Windows? 244
An anonymous reader writes "One cool feature I used on KMail years ago was the ability to generate a spoofed email bounce for any given message I had received, which claimed delivery failed because of an unknown recipient. While this doesn't exactly align with expected behaviour from a mail client, it was a useful way of easily getting off mailing lists (automated, or manually created by freaky acquaintances!). This is something I really miss, so I'm wondering if there are any mail clients for Windows that provide similar functionality?"
Call Microsoft support and ask them (Score:3, Insightful)
Why don't you call Microsoft support and ask them. After all, isn't this one of the things you pay for and they are supposed to provide stellar support with?
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No, I agree with him. Slashdot is a major "news" site. This isn't experts-exchange or MS support. Why the hell is "how do I..." making front page news?
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"just to complain about how much better this site used to be."
i was here this site was not vastly better, there seemed to be many more here, but the stale jokes were more prominent and the level of disinformation higher.
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This is exactly right. It's like buying a brand-new BMW or Cadillac or whatever, and then wanting to convert it into an electric vehicle. Doing such a thing is really rather pointless: if you want an EV, you should either buy a car that was specifically engineered to be one (like a Leaf), or you should build your own. Don't expect any help from BMW/Cadillac on converting your brand-new car to an EV, and don't expect such cars to be optimal for such a conversion either (in fact, they're probably the absol
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Why don't you call Microsoft support and ask them. After all, isn't this one of the things you pay for and they are supposed to provide stellar support with?
So what you are really saying is that you don't know the difference between an operating system and the applications that run on it.
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Sure, go ahead... that's an easy answer, since the question started with "One cool feature I used on KMail years ago ...".
Bounce has legit purposes. The only reason you don't see it in many other clients is the pompous philosophy that UI's should completely remove features that might cause any confusion to any one of the users. It's extremely simple to implement, so that's not why it isn't there. It's been in mail clients of old, so they have actively had to do something in order to remove it (it's lack of
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Bounce has legit purposes. The only reason you don't see it in many other clients is the pompous philosophy that UI's should completely remove features that might cause any confusion to any one of the users. It's extremely simple to implement, so that's not why it isn't there.
It's unfortunate that Elm's "b" command (called "bounce") isn't any such thing, but actually a "redirect". When I originally asked for the same functionality in Thunderbird, I carelessly used the word "bounce", and this has led to the thread lasting for nearly a decade, as people constantly argued for and against allowing Tbird to actually perform a real bounce, when all I wanted was a redirect (had I know that that is what it was called — at the time — I would have kept my big mouth shut :-) Re
Outlook (Score:3, Informative)
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The second scenario is when big compa
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KDE on Windows? (Score:5, Informative)
Doesn't KDE run on Windows these days? You could probably just run KMail directly...
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Doesn't KDE run on Windows these days? You could probably just run KMail directly...
It sure does. cf. The Cygwin Project [cygwin.com]
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It sure does. cf. The Cygwin Project [cygwin.com]
Can't recommend that enough. Cygwin is the only thing making Windows into a usable operating system these days. You can even have Cygwin/X run on startup and run X apps on demand under Windows. If you don't need X, just install mintty. (You don't neeed separate installs for either, just select them in the Cygwin installer when installing it, and pin mintty to your Taskbar and/or copy the XWin Server shortcut to your Startup folder.)
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Cygwin and Msys are basically pointless. Windows already has a native UNIX subsystem [wikipedia.org]
Unfortunately, MS announced back in 2005 [slashdot.org] that the current release was going to be the last. It's been reported [technet.com] that Windows 8 does not contain the necessary components for it to run any more.
I've used SFU a little, and found it to be more lacking than cygwin in support for standard command line type stuff. I have doubts whether you could get kmail to work correctly with it, but I could be wrong. I don't have a Windows machine with me at the moment.
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Or you could just use the KDE installer: http://windows.kde.org/
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Or run Windows andLinux [andlinux.org].
telnet mailhost.foo.com 25 (Score:3)
If you don't speak SMTP as a second language you probably shouldn't have that feature.
*grin*
script it (Score:3)
yes... exactly, simply script it...
why not just build it yourself and publish it...
even outlook has scripting ability and hooks
maybe this is what you need :
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/mail-redirect/
or you could add to it...
regards
John Jones
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You won't get far with telnet unless you can do SSL in your head. I recommend socat [dest-unreach.org].
$ socat ssl:mail.foo.com:456 stdio
Usefulness (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Usefulness (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think ISPs should filter 25 by default but let anyone enable it (with e.g. a phone call). The intersection between the people who want to run their own mail server and the people who get infected by spamming malware is probably {}.
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Agree with this suggestion, there is nothing wrong with a "Walled Garden" as long as you make it known that it's there and that it can be removed "at your own risk". IIRC you get the notification from most major ISPs, usually buried in their TOS or AUP but some make it easy to find in their FAQ (usually under "running servers" or some such); but getting them to turn it off may be a lot harder. I actually prefer a walled garden for the less technically inclined, I heartily recommend OpenDNS (especially Famil
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1. Spammers most certainly do spam random addresses; and
2. Spammers almost invariably fake their return addresses (and a few years back someone used ones at my domain; I was getting 2000+ spams, bounces and flames per day)
Legitimate marketers that spam people who forget to opt-out might clean up their address lists, but the (even) shadier ones certainly don't seem to.
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Check out Eudora (Score:4, Informative)
Eudora had this feature in the past, so you might want to look at it and see if it still does.
http://eudora.com/ [eudora.com]
It's apparently open source now, so if you could add this feature if it doesn't exist.
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Thunderbird plugin (Score:2)
Mailwasher has a bounce feature (Score:2)
Bounce==Backscatter (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the from address is invariably forged, you do nothing with a bounce. In fact, it's worse than nothing, because you create backscatter [wikipedia.org]. I have suffered from backscatter and it is a pain - it just multiplies the spam problem. So, could I request that you just stop it!
If you actually know the person who is sending you the email then you should try a more personal approach rather than a passive aggressive bounce.
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/lacks mod points, so just commenting "thank you".
This is like taking all of your junk mail, writing "return to sender" on the outside, and shoving it in your neighbor's mailbox. Now it's wasted your time *and* your neighbor's time. Reject at the SMTP level with a proper spam filter, or just put the message in your own trash.
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Agreed it's much better to accept the email or not rather than this spam folder or bounce email BS. To do either creates backstatter or makes the system unreliable. Mail clients doing spam filtering is asinine the spam is already delivered do it on the server the mail client can help by reporting spam back to the server so it learns. Better for the odd false positive to get a near instant response that it was not delivered.
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Additionally real MTAs don't sent bounce messages anymore precisely because of the backscatter issue, and haven't for about ten years. (Of course there are always misconfigured systems.) Nobody will recognize the forged bounce as legitimate. So, sending a forged bounce will do nothing except annoy the poor sob who got Joe jobbed.
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These days, legitimate bounce messages are from your own MTA rather than the recipient's MTA.
If your MTA doesn't reject at the protocol level, but rather sends a bounce after processing, you will quickly end up on several DNSBLs. If you are on a DNSBL, you get rejected from a lot of MTAs. This is the kind of thing users notice and complain about.
With that said, there are an awful lot of misconfigured systems out there, and MTA best practice changes quite rapidly.
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Except the guy you're punching is the taxi driver who drove him to your location.
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alpine still supports it and runs on windows (Score:3, Informative)
alpine is also truly free software now.
FYI, alpine was pine. UW forked it, added a better build system, put it under a new license, released it as alpine, then discontinued development. The community has taken that and created the re-alpine project on sourceforge, where you can find the latest version. re-alpine [sourceforge.net]
Development continues, but isn't exactly what I'd call "active". But it's an ancient email client, and there's really not all that much that could be added. I still find it indispensable and use it constantly and I'm quite happy with it.
You never said you needed a windows-like UI, so this qualifies for the request, but YMMV.
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Seriously, guy, Kmail has not done this for years (Score:5, Informative)
At least since KDE 4, and from what I recall, maybe 3.4 or even 3.3, this feature was dropped.
Your time to bitch about it? That would be thataway.
Or use Thunderbird (Score:2)
The text of the message is:
Your message to:{your email}
Was undeliverable. No further diagnostics available.
MTA-Intermail550
That last part, my provider uses Intermail so I looked up it's error codes and just used the 550 message.
This has legit uses for domain owners (Score:4, Informative)
I own a domain of (for example) example.org that I have wildcarded to my INBOX. I get A LOT of all sorts of interesting misdirected emails meant for exampleinc.org and example.org.au including invoices, meeting confirmation messages, and frantic "why aren't you answering my email messages"
In Mail.APP on the Mac I used to do a bounce and they'd see that they screwed up and stop. If I send a personal email explaining often people go ape shit and get paranoid wondering why I am reading their email. (Unfortunately Apple removed that functionality as well)
So sometimes a more impersonal response IS better.
ps, yeah, I know, I could fiddle with my MTA and have it refuse the repeat offenders.... and I do now. Not as convenient though.
Fastmail (Score:2)
I doubt if it'll get you less spam, but manually bouncing mail is one of the many standard features of the Fastmail webclient. Runs on any platform that has a web browser.
I use it occasionally to get rid of humans...
Least effective method of reducing Spam possible (Score:2)
Apple pulled this from Mail with Lion for that reason. Spammers don't really care if your email is real or not. At least not much.
Closing the gate after the horse has bolted? (Score:2)
probably won't work (Score:2)
If you're counting on an automated process to handle your forged bounce, it probably won't work. In a strict sense, bounces sent with a non-empty Return-Path are incorrect [wikipedia.org] and unless you're running your own SMTP server, you probably won't be able to send mail with an empty Return-Path header.
If you're counting on a manual process to handle your forged bounce, I admire your faith in humanity.
Just don't do it. (Score:2)
Re:Mail Washer (Score:4, Informative)
While the spammy advertisement would normally warrant no attention, it does raise a point that is worth noting:
Because the from address is invariably forged, you do nothing with a bounce. In fact, it's worse than nothing, because you create backscatter [wikipedia.org]. I have suffered from backscatter and it is a pain - it just multiplies the spam problem. So, could I request that you just stop it!
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I'll tell you though, I've been pretty happy with my car (Toyota, for what it's worth) that over 6.5 years I've only opened the hood once, just so I knew how in case I ever had to.
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Teaching to fish > giving fish
Re:Can't Demand Strangers Spoon-feed You (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that saying just fucking google it isn't teaching somebody to fish either. It's very quick to enter terms into a search engine if you know what the answer is, and quite a bit more difficult if you have no idea what the answer should look like.
In this case you have to figure out how to exclude the various ways of saying anti-spoof while not excluding essential links. And google often times makes it a pain in the ass to find things as any appearance of the terms anywhere in the page is by default considered a match. Even if they're not only not in the same sentence, but not even in the same paragraph. My favorite thing is when the engine finds the words in a link bar on the side of the page or as contact information at the bottom.
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This kind of arrogance is why we can't have nice things. Most of the time when I find an answer to something that's stumped me the thread doesn't contain any one post or sentence that includes all of the symptoms. Mainly because the person asking for help doesn't know what the relevant information is.
Under your suggestion I wouldn't find any of those examples because it's post by post and bit by bit. Which works, assuming you use the same spelling as the poster and you don't need to combine it with other th
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Build a man a fire, you keep him warm for one night.
Set a man on fire, you keep him warm for the rest of his life.
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Showing someone a fishing rod != teaching them to fish
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It's not enough time to solve the problem. There have been plenty of times where even after a couple hours of searching for an answer somebody else who knew what to look for could find it in about 30 seconds. And I know there have been times where I could find something almost instantly because I knew the cause from years back.
Just fucking google it is really not an acceptable response in cases like this.
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Hey twat, who the hell are you replying to? That quote doesn't come from anywhere in this thread. Or are you assuming that someone will say it, so you can bitch about it?
But to try to stay on topic.
I really hate these threads. By the time I turn to Google to find the answer to a problem, it usually means I've exhausted my vast knowledge, and that of my friends. More often than not, I find plenty of these threads saying "go figure it out yourself" and "don't
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I prefer the crossover Tommy Wiseua The Room version:
Oh Hai Twat
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"Let me google that for you" http://lmgtfy.com/ [lmgtfy.com] would seem to make a lot more sense, since you would actually be helping someone learn a search term that works, vs the thousands that don't.
But of course, if you're just trying to be a dick, your link is much better.
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guess that means this post is me being a jerk as well.
seems that's become S.O.P. for most slashdotters these days
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Re:Can't have your cake and eat it too. (Score:5, Insightful)
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"I'm fairly sure Windows is a general purpose OS with no one philosophy"
Then, IMNSHO your are wrong.
"It has a market share of over 90% - every kind of person uses Windows."
Flawed argument: almost every kind of person uses Windows... in basically the same way.
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Don't you people ever get tired of the Linux vs. Windows pillow fight?
Most people use Windows because it is very functional and there are more application programs written for it than for Linux or any other operating system.
Get over it, Linux people. Windows is here to stay and Linux will never be more popular than it is.
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Honestly, I don't care what kind of dog you like, just keep it from crapping in my yard from now on.
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... and keeping me up with its barking ... and mauling my children
Sometimes Windows is a rabid pit bull, causing massive issues outside its circle.
But then just like any dog can bite, and OS can cause massive issues!
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Doesn't email have something to do with the interwebs?
That means this should be a function of Internet Explorer.
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Did you even read the post?
He asked for a mail client that runs on windows with this functionality.
Derp.
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That's weird; with Windows, I have to waste all kinds of time hunting down drivers for devices, and the UI is so deficient I can't get much work done because there's no virtual desktops to separate my activities into, and the one workspace gets so cluttered with dozens of open windows.
As someone who has gone from Windows to Linux and now uses both equally for various purposes, I understand the addiction of virtual desktops. In fact, when KDE went from 3.5 to 4.0 and took away the ability to have a different background image for each desktop (yes, I know, petty; but that is a quirk of mine), I ended up shopping around for a new desktop environment, eventually discovering Enlightenment.
Anyway, for Windows, if you are using ATI or nVidia video cards, the driver and utility packages for the
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Most of us, um, buy a machine with Windows installed and then never touch it again. I've built all my Windows/Linux machines since my first Windows machine, but it's a tremendous waste of time and really something I only do for the fun of it.
Once you have an HP/Dell/Sony/whatever, the resident memory-hogging auto updater keeps everything up-to-date. The days of hunting down drivers on Windows have been lost to the last century.
That said, you're post is tremendously misleading unless you have a rig bought sp
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That said, you're post is tremendously misleading unless you have a rig bought specifically with Linux in mind or you are lucky and you have older hardware. Wireless drivers are still a pain half the time and laptops are a real PITA overall.
Sorry, I haven't noticed that. Maybe on crap hardware, but I bought a Thinkpad T510 earlier this year and Linux Mint installed on it with no issues at all, including drivers for the Broadcom wireless chip.
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You got lucky :)
That laptop is apparently very well supported, but even then features like on-demand video switching probably don't work, and getting both video cards working even when switching them manually on boot is not something that "just works". Unless you just have the integrated version, in which case you are good. You are also lucky regarding power management - laptops are notorious on any OS for buggy ACPI, and Linux is usually pretty unforgiving and you end up updating the BIOS and praying. And
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No, mine's the lower-end version with integrated graphics. This is Linux; I'm not playing high-end games here. Admittedly, video-chip-switching is one place where Linux definitely doesn't work at all, but that's really a fairly new feature in laptops unless I'm mistaken. But again, if you're using a laptop for work and not games, integrated graphics really should be sufficient. I have a desktop PC with a larger Nvidia card if I want to do any more-serious 3D work.
The key to Linux on laptops is to get a
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The only use for video-chip-switching (actually running them in parallel) is multiple monitors. That laptop of yours can do three monitors under Windows, which is pretty cool for certain tasks. Of course, with a capable desktop of similar power going for less than $500-600, why not have a desktop for that kind of work?
Linux has worked on every desktop I've ever tried it on, though it sometimes throws fits over the ACPI and so I can't use sleep reliably. It sometimes doesn't like on-board ethernet, so I have
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The only use for video-chip-switching (actually running them in parallel) is multiple monitors.
Maybe we're talking about something else; I thought lately it was more for having one low-power GPU (the integrated crappy one) for regular work to extend battery life, and then being able to switch to a high-power AMD or Nvidia GPU for more demanding tasks, but on the same monitor.
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I went back to the Just Works(tm) environment of Cubase + Win XP after nearly throwing my computer out the window trying to get that steaming pile of shit Jack to work with Ardour.
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the thing with linux is a lot of it's tools lack the polish of commercial software, mainly because it is designed to run as a server, or a tablet(with ubuntu unity). and they add support for software very cautiously with little imagination. heck some installers for linux are like a maze and if you don't know the right map to get it installed it doesn't even work...
Re:You are wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
If I read the question correctly, he's not talking about getting off of spam lists, he's talking about getting off of legitimate mailing lists that are annoying. It's a fine distinction, but you're talking about "spam" which is things like Viagra ads and others that are not legitimate, but are instead mailed from zombie/botnet computers and the like and are really illegal. He's talking about mailing lists owned or bought by companies and used to send completely legitimate emails to prospective customers; you can get on these when you give out your email address, or when you buy things online from various companies. You might only get emails from a company you bought from, or they may sell your email address and then you'll get emails from other companies you haven't bought from. Either way, it's actually legal AFAICT, until you opt-out. The problem is the opt-out process usually isn't that easy, by design. But these emails, to my knowledge, do in fact come from the proper domain; Sears, Walmart, etc. are not going to use botnets to send their email ads.
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This.
The question is not whether or not to bounce random unwanted mail, but how to bounce mail back to "mailing lists."
When I see "mailing list," the first thing I think of is listserv [wikipedia.org] and its cousins, not V ! 4 G R /\ spam.
I used to use this feature in Pine on a shared FreeBSD box about 16 years ago, and would still find it useful on occasion if it existed commonly today.
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If they want to get off a legitimate mailing list, they should read the documentation and use the unsubscribe feature.
Bouncing mail and annoying people who run a legitimate service is antisocial at best.
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Why should you have to spend a half-hour looking for some obscure way of getting off a mailing list, only to find it doesn't even work? Many mailing lists don't WANT you to get off it: it's advertising; why would an advertiser want to not advertise to someone when the cost to do so is zero?
We're not talking about well-behaved mailing lists where you just send an "unsubscribe" command to listserv@somerandomlist.org and it's done. We're talking about junk email (you could call it spam) from corporations who
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I had one such spam list that refused to remove me. The admin was s total dick and kept re-adding my email address every time I removed it. After going through this bit of getting re-added once a week and the list admin telling me to fuck off, I took a little more aggressive action. The listserv was so poorly setup, it let anyone add/remove subscriptions for any email address so I unsubbed everyone except the owner and subscribed the list's email address to itself. I finally got a response from the admi
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Why do large corporations so often have a From addresses in their email which is specifically noted to not be monitored by humans under any circumstances?
If the only useful purpose for those addresses is to bounce mail back at them, then what possible human harm or inconvenience could come from doing so?
Geez, indeed.
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If I read the question correctly, he's not talking about getting off of spam lists, he's talking about getting off of legitimate mailing lists that are annoying.
Which doing what he suggests won't achieve — at least, not immediately. LISTSERV, for example, normally takes note of a 550 unknown user, but only adds it to a monitoring list, because some users may be on flaky Exchange servers which sometimes just issue 550s when they have lost their little minds temporarily. After a configurable period or repeated 550s, the address is removed from the list; otherwise it stays. The action is configurable: I'm on one list which instantly drops me if my employer's mai
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I'm a mutt user. Care to share how this is done in mutt?
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but what does the kama sutra have to do with the subject at hand??
seriously could you point out which section of the Mutt Manual covers the request??
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I don't think 'bounce' means what you (or Mutt) think it means.
In particular, OP wants to create an NDR from the message; 'b' just redirects the message (adding on another line or two of header glop). Not the same thing.
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