Where did ‘Bounce’ go?

In Mac OS X Lion, whenever I received Junk mail or unwanted advertising, I used to bounce it back. This method got rid of it and did not tell the sender that their email had reached a valid address, or that the email had been opened. It worked, and gone really was gone.

With the El Capitan upgrade, ‘Bounce’ has bounced off! Now we have to either drag the offending junk straight to the Trash (no problem there if you spot it in time), or, if I inadvertently do open it, there may be an ‘unsubscribe’ option which often does not work. On those occasions when it does work, it seems to generate more from the same sender or, just now, a phone call to my ex-directory number about the same subject. When I questioned the lady at the other end she admitted that unsubscribing sent my address to an international marketing database for follow up. However, she wouldn’t divulge how she got my number. I terminated the call.

Is there a hidden way of bouncing, or can Apple Almighty be persuaded to give it back to us? by Peter Whickman

graham says… When Apple removes a feature it usually has a good reason for doing so. Bounce was removed because a lot of the time spammers aren’t sending it from their actual email address, they’re spoofing the address of somebody else, and when you bounce the email back you end up either sending the bounce back to a false email address, or worse, to an innocent third party. There are Automator scripts you can find online for creating your own Bounce feature in Mail, but we’d recommend not doing it as this feature was removed for a reason.

So, what to do? The easiest solution is to use a Gmail, Yahoo or iCloud email address, as these services have solid server-side spam filtering, so you’ll find that the offending emails are already in the Spam folder and don’t interfere with your regular inbox.