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Ask Slashdot: Spoof an Email Bounce With Windows?
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?"
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?
I'm not a fan of MS Outlook, but it's integrated VBA makes writing a custom plugin easy and painless. Visual Basic in any flavor had a bad stigma, however, having a development environment right in the application is exactly what I would think would solve your problem effectively.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Doesn't KDE run on Windows these days? You could probably just run KMail directly...
#!/bin/csh cat $0
If you don't speak SMTP as a second language you probably shouldn't have that feature.
*grin*
Not even a 550 SMTP session will get you off most mailing lists because, even if it is a legitimate list, the marketers are too aggressive to care. Also, a NDR after a successful session will likely go to either an unmonitored mailbox, a hapless user who won't understand it, or null. Weed through some email logs and you'll see. I see some lists that have been emailing the same address for ten years and I always disconnect with a 550. That said, try Pegasus Mail. I find that it does almost anything.
Eudora had this feature in the past, so you might want to look at it and see if it still does.
http://eudora.com/
It's apparently open source now, so if you could add this feature if it doesn't exist.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/mail-redirect/
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
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. 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!
Mailwasher has that feature, plus a few more. http://www.mailwasher.net/
Because the from address is invariably forged, you do nothing with a bounce. In fact, it's worse than nothing, because you create backscatter. 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.
Teaching to fish > giving fish
I work in the automotive industry, specifically related to roadside service (tow trucks and such). I can tell you without reservation that the worst cars today are still more reliable than the best cars of decades gone by. Use per capita for road service has been steadily going down since as far back as I'm aware of our records.
Why not?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sidestepping the whole garbage that your post was, how the hell is this an OS function? It isn't in Linux either. And there is no reason why it couldn't be done on any OS.
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.
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 you know how to work a search engine?" Sometimes they'll post links back to their own page on the subject, but the page will have been gone for years, and it wouldn't have attracted the attention of archive.org. So, no answers.
If you have an answer for someone, say what the fucking answer is. Don't pretend that you're so much smarter, and they can go figure it out themselves. As I've learned, most of the people who play that game, don't know the answer themselves.
I'm not replying to the OP, because I don't have an answer. I do have some rather complicated ones, but those don't seem to be the ones that he wants. That would be something like, make another account on a Linux machine. Forward messages he wants bounced to that account. That account should have .forward pointing to a script (Perl would be my choice), which removes the forwarding information, and crafts a nice legitimate looking bounce message.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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.
Fata viam invenient.
Doesn't email have something to do with the interwebs?
That means this should be a function of Internet Explorer.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
"Let me google that for you" http://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.
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.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
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??
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
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 admin the next day, who accused me of mailbombing him and bitched that his list was subsequently black listed by several major ISPs. He couldn't prove I did it. I think he got exactly what he deserved.
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.
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.
yeah, google gave up proper boolean operations a long long time ago, now they try to outsmart the user, but with a very stupid algorithm. Very frustrating.
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.
Kid-proof tablet..
Showing someone a fishing rod != teaching them to fish