21

Prima facie this is impossible but perhaps someone has some kind of hack to do it. This is one of the last things holding me back from switching to Gmail from Pine.

To be clear, bouncing a message is like forwarding but leaving all the headers intact. It sort of amounts to spoofing the email, which perhaps is why Gmail doesn't support it. To the recipient of a bounced email, it seems as if they were just BCC'd.

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  • 1
    All modern mail-clients will bounce but also add Resent-* headers, so it's not quite as transparent any more.
    – Phil P
    Jul 14, 2010 at 1:43
  • There is no line that begins with "X-From_:" in the "show original" message. Any other suggestions?
    – user10526
    Apr 28, 2011 at 13:12
  • I only ever bounced messages to get dropped from spam lists - when messages get bounced, they generally won't try again
    – warren
    Apr 28, 2011 at 13:53
  • You can use a service like Block Sender for Gmail™, but it's a subscription service.
    – ale
    Apr 13, 2016 at 14:09
  • No, @warren and Al E. are talking about a different kind of bouncing. I mean forwarding an email to someone else without creating a new email like forwarding does. It's just as if the new recipient was bcc'd on the original email, ie, adding new people to the bcc list after the fact.
    – dreeves
    Apr 14, 2016 at 17:51

3 Answers 3

6

Sam Ruby posted a workaround:

  • From the message dropdown, select Show original, then from the browser select Save Page As....
  • With a text editor, find the line containing X-From_:. Copy this line to the top of the file, then modify that first line by removing the X- and _: characters. Save the file.
  • Now you case use mutt on that file (example: mutt -f mail.google.com) and use the b command to bounce the message. Enter the name of the mailing list (example: [email protected]), press enter and then y to confirm.
2
6

Use Gmail + Thunderbird + mail redirect extension.

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    This will work, but I think dreeves can quite happily do this from pine and wants to know how to do it in the web interface. Jul 14, 2010 at 12:26
5

Not possible, and unlikely to ever be possible given that it effectively constitutes a forged from address, which Gmail goes to some lengths to protect against (eg requiring verification for send-as aliases).

I miss this feature from mutt, but not so much that it wasn't worth the switch.

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    I miss that from mutt too. Good ole' mutt.
    – Adam
    Jul 14, 2010 at 23:05
  • 1
    I use mutt to read, write, and bounce my GMail without any problem. Aug 10, 2015 at 8:35

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