You can view the original on its own project page: https://annesque.com/features/bounce

I have wanted this functionality personally for a long time, and today is the day I finally have it! It has been a looong and windy road to get this far, and the journey is far from over. The fight contra spam continues.

Spam filters are two sides of a coin: on the one hand, you don't want to be inudated with spam. On the other hand, if you let a behemoth (golge or similar) dictate it for you, what messages you see and what messages you don't, then you very much sacrifice your freedom. It was in the news, that google would send republican marketing campaigns to spam, while democrat marketing campaigns reached their recipients. I'll do you one better: I have seen my invoices being sent to spam, and a customer would then ask me to send invoices they are missing - with a net-30 pay schedule, a customer may or may not notice a missing email within 30 days. Golgle and other behemoths delete what they consider "spam", "on your behalf", in 30 days - so if you let them dictate what spam means, you are helping them to censor your speech. I do not voluntarily self-sensor, I'd rather struggle against the behemoth.

Of course, if you save every email including spam, you will be inundated by those as well. I have seen that in my system, there I can't see important emails between the million or so emails that I keep. I felt that my mailbox was full of trash - and it was.

Unsubscribing from senders does not make sense, either. When they say you have been unsubscribed from "this" maillist, all they need to do is re-sell your data and re-create a new maillist, and you'll be receiving spam again. I'm sure you've been there. You cannot let other people keep track of what you unsubscribe from. Only you can effectively manage your own un-subscriptions.

The solution? Bounce emails! This means that your recipient email system would not only not save the bounced email, but send an eror to the sender. Senders are strongly inclined to avoid bounces, so they should stop sending entirely. Bouncing usually happens when the mailbox doesn't exist - no email client allows you to selectively bounce messages based on the sender, based on what you consider spam. Until now.

Annesque offers just this functionality. I am proud to have implemented and deployed it, and it is in live testing (beta) mode. I already have a looong list of senders I bounce. Yet, my mailbox is still functional, and receives emails from people who I to not destrict. Unknown senders are also not bounced, but that is by choice. Here is how this works.

Briefly very technically: the server stack, called postal server, which I use for email receiving did not allow this functionality. I therefore put an smtp filter in front of it. The filter is a custom plugin into a haraka instance. The plugin actually checks the downstream database, my main UI, for leads and leadsets that I want to bounce. Messages from those guys get bounced, and I don't receive them at all.

Currently, it is setup with a well-defined tag. A Lead or a Leadset tagged 'bounce' will be bounced.

bounce a lead

bounce a leadset

This is in contrast to the tag 'bounced', which means to not send emails to an address that has bounced in the past. As opposed to prevent receiving an email.

So... that's that. Even though under the hood the system is quite complicated, I'm happy that the UI is very intuitive. Just mark either a lead or a whole leadset as 'bounce', and you will never hear from them again - and they are likely to stop sending altogether.