How do I Bounce an email?
 

There used to be "bounce" option, to make it appear to the sender that the email has bounced.

I no longer see this as an option.

If there's no option anymore, is it possible to do this by sieve filtering? From identifying a specific email address?

The bounce option has gone, this should work but its not a silent bounce.

if header :contains ["From", "X-Mail-from", "Return-Path"] "_____@_____" {
reject "Message rejected because ___________!";
stop;
}

This should just discard
if anyof(
envelope :contains ["from","to"] "your domain.com",
header :contains ["X-Delivered-to", "X-Mail-from"] ["email from"],

discard;
stop;
}

If you use your own domain, also read this thread

I do use my own domain, and just looked at that thread. How does that distinguish?

Also, I don't want to discard the message -- I want to keep it, but I want the sender to receive a bounce.

I have told my office colleagues and managers not to email me at my personal email address while on leave, so I only want to do this with emails from my workplace.

First, I need to see what a normal bounce looks like.

This is not working at all.

The messages are being delivered, and not being rejected, etc.

How do I bounce an email from a specific domain?

The sender must immediately be notified that the email bounced.

I do not want to discard the email -- but I want to have the sender receive an immediate bounce message.

Here's the code I'm using:

It's not working at all.

* Emails are going into the Inbox, not the "cdrom" folder

* Sender at the xxxx.yy.tld email address is receiving nothing

Is the "xxx.da.gov" in quotes in the actual sieve code. If not, it needs to be. I would expect a syntax error if the quotes are missing, but perhaps not.

Tried everything -- Still going directly to the inbox -- Not getting a syntax error at all.

Current code:

Not working at all.

How do I set it so that the sender receives a bounce?

The emails aren't even going into the designated folder.

At the very beginning of my rules:

However, this is working just fine:

And it's going into the INBOX.cdrom folder.

The reject isn't working.

I wish FM didn't remove the bounce option.

It's very important that any recipient from this domain receives a bounce.

Currently, the only way to do this is to disable the alias.

However, there are two problems with disabling the alias:

1) All emails will be rejected
2) No emails will be received

I want to only reject emails from the domain

xxxx.da.gov

have the sender receive a bounce, and file these emails into a specific folder.

How do I setup a bounce?

Try changing the order to
Maybe, sieve processing terminates after the reject. This is especially true as the standard recommends that the reject occur at the SMTP stage (while sieve normally occurs later). FastMail may well have logic that attempts to conform with that standard.

If all else fails, you can achieve similar results by means of a vacation response. Just replace "reject" in your code with "vacation".

The big difference between reject and a vacation response is that the vacation response is only sent to a specific sender, by default, once every three days, regardless of how many messages he sends you. I believe (though I have not tried it) the interval can be changed, but the vacation response will still not occur for every message received.

For more details on the sieve vacation response extension, see https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ie...ve-vacation-07

"xxxx.da.gov" is it missing .com on the end or .us

"xxxx.da.gov.com"

edited .......................................

I was wondering if my work's server wasn't receiving the bounce, so I've tried this with an @gmail.com address.

The following does not work:

It not only doesn't work, but it doesn't even go into the INBOX.cdrom folder, and no bouncat gmail.

However, this still does work:

and files the incoming message into the INBOX.cdrom folder.

The reject code does not work -- period.

I sent a support message to FM, pointing to this thread, as well.

I am displeased that I am unable to bounce a message from a specific sender. It used to be simple command.

This is by no means a solution. This will occur with every email address that I receive email at (and I have many) and will not be the same as a bounce.

I want one specific sender, or a specific domain, to get a bounce message, believing it's an INVALID Email address.

Is it not possible to do a bounce?

I think you are misunderstanding what I suggest. I am not recommending you give a vacation response to every sender. I am suggesting you use vacation response only under exactly the same conditions you are trying to use a reject:
As I mentioned before, if you want the sender to receive the vacation response more frequently than once every three days (the FastMail default) refer to the documentation for the vacation extension.

Reject action discards message
 

I think that the only solution is a vacation message. As long as you have a spam filter activated, Fastmail supports the reject Sieve action. But Sieve does not allow you to both reject and save a particular message. If the message is rejected then it’s not possible to save a copy.

You could also reject the message with the understanding that the message will be discarded after it is rejected. The reason your earlier examples failed is that you must only use the reject action and not try to include a fileinto action.

Bill

Although I suspect that would also fail, the combination of a redirect and a reject might be worth trying. The sieve code would be something like
Not tested!

Possibly worth trying as the redirect may be processed at SMTP time.

Using reject discards original message
 

That fails. The message is not redirected, the reject message is not sent, and the original incoming message appears in your Inbox. I tried various things before my post stating that you can’t reject and save the original message.

The only possibility I can imagine would be to use an alias (not the main account address) and set more than one target delivery address. This creates two or more separate messages which are separately delivered to your account. You should then be able to use sieve rules so that one message is delivered to some folder or Inbox on your account while the other generates the reject message. But this could get very messy. I will try to test this technique later this weekend if have some time.

In general you need to be very careful about post-SMTP bounces back to the sender, since these can lead to backscatter spam. In addition, if the original sender has a vacation response activated you might bounce their automatic response back to them. If they had a reject system like yours, then without some way to count the messages an infinite email loop might be created, which the two email systems exchanging bounces. This might lead to one or both accounts being temporarily closed by the email providers.

My suggestion is to just tell those people not to use your personal email address from their work account. If you feel strongly about this, you can discard all incoming mail from that domain. Or send a bounce to message sent from that domain, including a comment that their message was discarded and won’t be read.

Bill

Multiple alias targets allows message to be both bounced and kept
 

As I suspected, you can use alias targeting to both reject ("bounce") certain messages and keep those messaged in your account. Here is how to do this:

• You must receive these messages at an alias address. This could be at your private domain or a Fastmail domain. Go to the Settings>Aliases address you will use and add a second target Deliver to address with the addition of +reject before the @. For example, if your main account address was jcitizen@fastmail.com, you would use two target Deliver to addresses for that alias as follows (assuming you want normal delivery to Inbox):
  • jcitizen@fastmail.com
  • jcitizen+reject@fastmail.com
• Then add the following in the first block of custom Sieve script:
  
  Code:

  ---

  if allof (
  header :contains ["From", "X-Mail-from", "Return-Path"] "xxxx.da.gov",
  header :contains ["X-Resolved-to"] ["jcitizen+reject@fastmail.com"]
) {
  reject "Please don't use this address!";
  stop;
}
elsif header :contains ["X-Resolved-to"] ["jcitizen+reject@fastmail.com"] {
  discard;
  stop;
}

  ---

• When a message from the gov address is received, the sender will receive a reject message as follows:
  • From: Mail Sieve Subsystem <postmaster@messagingengine.com>
  • Subject: Automatically rejected mail
  • Body: Your message was automatically rejected by Sieve, a mail filtering language.
    
    The following reason was given:
    Please don't use this address!
  • Two attachments are included. One is the original message. The second (named Attachment2) contains the message disposition status. It will be similar to:
    Reporting-UA: sloti22d1t13; Cyrus fastmail-fmjessie45441-15552-git-fastmail-15552/CMU Sieve 3.0
    Original-Recipient: rfc822; <Original destination address>
    Final-Recipient: rfc822; Ys555yY76QL5/Gi34eksvyyKoFA87Wrd33cLPI5cQS 15444113573
    Original-Message-ID: <1507331572.631740.1131244464.466GH196@webmail.messagingengine.com>
    Disposition: automatic-action/MDN-sent-automatically; deleted
  • A copy of the message will be placed in your Inbox..
• If you receive a normal incoming message to that alias (not from the gov From address), the elseif... clause in the rule will discard the message delivered with +reject. But the normally targeted message will be delivered since my rule will be ignored.

I have tested the Sieve rule I posted above (with a different From and my own alias) and it works correctly. But other Sieve rules (automatic or manual) could interact with this rule, so be sure to test it before trusting it.

Bill

Nice solution Bill.
I always learn something when I read your posts. :)

........................

I'm using my own domain and it's not working.

I can't add the following alias:

adam+reject@MyVirtualDomain.com

See this image:

https://i.imgur.com/5WwfHZM.jpg

Clearly, FM does not allow this using a non-FM domain.

This is being sent to a non-FM domain, and FM does not allow me to add

alias+reject

or

alias+ anything

The + sign is not allowed.

The "reject" is not a bounce
 

Using this simply code:

Here's the reply which took almost a minute:

See image:

https://i.imgur.com/aAjMMfy.jpg

------------

Your message was automatically rejected by Sieve, a mail
filtering language.

The following reason was given:
Message rejected because Invalid Email Recipient

-----------------

There are no attachments.

They don't get a true bounce reply, rather a message telling them that I set up a Sieve, a "filtering language".

This is not a bounce, I can't get the allof code above to work, and I'm still trying to find a way to bounce a message from a specific sending domain.

Please carefully read my earlier comments. The alias itself does not include any + symbol. You need to include two target Deliver to addresses for the alias (which can be an existing alias), and one of those targets needs to include the plus+addressing +reject tag. It doesn't have to be "+reject" and could be "+r" or something else.
What's important is that there are two delivery targets so that two slightly different of the incoming message are separately processed by your Sieve script. Here is what happens in my example, assuming that the alias was me@example.org and your Fastmail account name was jcitizen@fastmail.com:

• An incoming message is sent to the alias me@example.org.
• A copy of that message is first delivered to jcitizen@fastmail.com. No matter what From address was used by the sender, this copy of the message does not trigger either the if or the elsif conditional clauses so my additional Sieve is ignored. So this copy of the message is delivered to your account in the normal fashion using your other rules.
• Then a copy of that same message is delivered to jcitizen+reject@fastmail.com.
  • If it is From the gov sender, the first conditional clause is executed and a reject bounce message is generated. Due to the way that Sieve handles the reject action, this copy is not delivered to any of your folders (or the remainder of the Sieve script).
  • If it is not from the gov sender, the second conditional clause is executed and this copy of the message is not delivered to your account. But remember that the first copy was already delivered, so this is the desired behavior.

Bill

...................................

I have set up two targets as follows:

https://i.imgur.com/8dcHMov.jpg

It is still not working.

Here is the code I'm using:

The result:

Email goes into my inbox.

No return message to sender @gmail.com

At this time, I'm using "gmail.com" instead xxxx.ca.gov to test.

Sending from a Gmail account (a "gmail.com" address) and not getting a bounce message at gmail.

Again, here's the code I'm using:

Why is the sender, from gmail.com, not getting a bounce?

When I test my Sieve script example modified for my Gmail From address, I get the correct behavior. If I look at the original (raw) message contents which are received at Gmail due to the rejection, the rejection message has a 3-part mulitipart MIME body. Gmail displays this differently than Fastmail to the user if you don't look at the raw message.

For your latest example to work, your Fastmail account main login address must be adam@axxxxx.com and you must have some alias which has two delivery targets:

• adam@axxxxx.com
• adam+reject@axxxxx.com

However, your image indicates that your Fastmail account is at the fastmail.com domain. Please carefully read my earlier messages and note that the Sieve script does not use any portion of your alias. The two target (Deliver to) addresses entered for your alias are targets at your Fastmail account login address, and the Sieve script contains your Fastmail account main (login) address with +reject.

Bill

Should the sieve code be using:

alias@fastmail.com

alias+reject@fastmail.com

?

Now this is my code:

I am reading your messages carefully. I'm trying to setup the specific steps, but it's still not working. I just tested this, and nothing is being returned the sender at "gmail.com".

No. As I keep pointing out, my Sieve script uses your Fastmail main (login) address with +reject. So the Sieve code uses "jcitizen+reject@fastmail.com" if your Fastmail login address is "jcitizen@fastmail.com". Please read my posts carefully again and you will see that the alias address is not used. All that matters is that the alias delivery to targets are:

• Your Fastmail login address
• Your Fastmail login address with +reject

I won't be able to respond further for another 10 hours or so.

Bill

...........................

I tested Bill's script and it works for me.

When you send your test email from Gmail, are you sending it to the correct alias where you have setup the extra redirect that includes the +reject ?

I just got it working.

The problem was I have two very similar domains, each with the same alias, and I needed to add the targets to the correct domain.

However, this is the return message being sent back to gmail:

https://i.imgur.com/1ut3NQ9.jpg

I'm not getting a bounce with attachments.

It's from:

Mail Sieve Subsystem <postmaster@messagingengine.com>

and the body of the return mail states the following:

Your message was automatically rejected by Sieve, a mail
filtering language.

The following reason was given:
INVALID Email Address

---------- Forwarded message ----------

There are no attachments, it clearly states I'm using Sieve filtering language, and it's not what a bounce normally looks like.

Bill states:

That's not consistent (see my image link above) with what I'm getting.

I just tested it using an @sent.com email address and did get the attachments as follows:

https://i.imgur.com/xmmiFMj.jpg

The body still states:

Your message was automatically rejected by Sieve, a mail
filtering language.

The following reason was given:
INVALID Email Address

and the subject is:

Automatically rejected mail

It appears it varies based upon the email service at hand from the sender.

I will test it on Monday from the office using @xxxxx.ca.gov

This is what the Google version looks like:

https://i.imgur.com/3dt5unh.jpg

But there are no attachments.

Seems like Gmail doesn't include the attachments.

It'll be interesting to see, on Monday (in about 36 hours) what it looks like from xxxx.ca.gov

Bill -- Thank you for all your assistance in this matter.

Things can be a bit confusing with all the steps sometime. I inadvertently added the second target -- alias+reject@fastmail.com -- to a similar, but different, virtual domain with the same alias, adam@ (I have two domains -- one with first initial and last name, and the other with first name and last name -- i.e. jdoe.com and johndoe.com) and I noticed after your last message that I mixed up the two.

Interesting that Gmail doesn't send the attachments, but FM does.

Gmail Inbox:
https://i.imgur.com/3dt5unh.jpg

Gmail message body:
https://i.imgur.com/1ut3NQ9.jpg

Fastmail:
https://i.imgur.com/xmmiFMj.jpg

I'll test the xxxx.yy.tld address on Monday. The agency using MS Outlook, so I'm hopeful that it'll alert accordingly. I'll report back with the results.

As I said before, Gmail for some reason ignores much of the message disposition notice for the normal user view. But you can see these details by using Show original when reading the message in Gmail.
The Outlook Exchange server (when viewed using Office 365) shows the following bounce (sent from "Mail Sieve Subsystem" <postmaster@messagingengine.com>):
Bill