Bouncing mail in Thunderbird
I really like Thunderbird as an email client. It supports most of what I like to do with mail. One feature that I have missed from other mail clients I have used however, is the ability to bounce email (send with original headers, not forward) to one or more persons. In the past I have dealt with this in a rather cumbersome way, logging into my shell account on my server and using pine to bounce messages when needed. That gets tiresome quickly so I end up forwarding many things I should have bounced.
Enter the “Mail Redirect” Thunderbird Extension.
From the Mail Redirect home page: “If you use Mailredirect Extension headers are not changed, so recipient of redirected mail has almost original message. In practice all important headers in redirected message are identical to original one (From, CC, Message-Id, Date). … When redirecting email, body and headers are leaved untouched, so fields like Received:, From:, To: in redirected message are the same as in original one. However redirected mail differs a bit from original one. There is added a few new headers: Resent-From:, Resent-To:, Resent-Date:, Resent-Message-Id: and Resent-User-Agent: which allow to identify redirected mails. “
This extension allows me to do everything I used to do with email from one client. It will be nice if someday it makes it into the official Thunderbird builds however, I am pleased that it is available. I wish I would have found it earlier.
Bouncing email is covered in RFC 2822.
Thunderbird is a great email client. Now, that I can bounce emails that’s even greater! Thank you.
Comment by Alin — 12/6/2005 @ 6:13 pm
I will install the extension, but I wish I could agree with Alin that TBird is a great client. A good client, maybe. A sucky client, often.
I recently converted from Apple’s Mail.app and am wishing I hadn’t.
Comment by Dave — 1/29/2006 @ 12:15 pm
This is a great extension! I’ve had the same experience with you of having to manage two clients (PINE and Thunderbird) to use the bounce feature. Thanks for making Thunderbird even better!
Comment by John — 9/19/2006 @ 5:43 am
This is great! Now I will be able to migrate totally to thunderbird. I was delaying because of this feature!
Comment by ND — 3/28/2007 @ 2:24 am
Is there ANY way (plugin, natively, whatever) to bounce messages back to the sender? Not redirect to someone else, or have to specify the address, but simply bounce as undeliverable.
I have old business contacts that send me stuff, like jokes and crap. I don’t want to be openly rude, but being able to simply bounce the message as undeliverable would make them pay attention and take care of their address book.
Comment by Will B. — 9/27/2007 @ 11:04 am
Hey Will, You might want to look into using procmail for that. I’m sure there’s a recipe around to do what you would like.
Comment by marc — 9/27/2007 @ 11:15 am