Can I 'bounce' junk emails from Outlook?

Q The Incredimail email application incorporates a useful ‘bounce’ button that is designed to send unwanted emails, such as junk email (also known as spam), straight back to where they came from.

The idea is that this greatly reduces spam and other emails you don’t want to receive. Can I incorporate this function into Outlook or Outlook Express?

Robin Stichbury

A Neither Outlook nor Outlook Express offer a ‘bounce’ option for received email but we are not convinced by the value of this feature anyway.

Spam gets sent in batches measured by the million and since most spam is ignored, we suspect that spammers are not too interested in spending time weeding out the odd invalid email address from their lists.

More to the point, spammers are more interested in getting you to click the links contained in emails rather than having you reply to them, so spam is almost always usually sent from false addresses.

So, ‘bouncing’ a spam message will either send yet another unwanted email to an innocent person’s email address (more spam, in other words), or result in a genuine bounced reply of its own – neither of which serves any purpose.

An effective spam filter is a far better way to defeat spam.

However, if you still want to bounce messages while using Outlook, one way to do it would be to use a free program called Mailwasher. This allows email to be inspected on the server before it’s downloaded to your PC’s email program. It also includes a ‘bounce’ option.

The free version of Mailwasher can only be used with one email account but this should suit most people.

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