There is a moron (not spammer) that keeps sending me unwanted emails. Currently those emails are directed to the junk folder in Outlook, but I want a different solution. I want to bounce the emails back to the sender, essentially telling the person the emails cannot be delivered to my address, or perhaps my address is no longer valid. Any solution in Outlook? Thanks!!!
Outlook – How to bounce an email back to the sender in Outlook
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Related Solutions
There was a time when servers would try to bounce all failed email. (There was a time when you could more or less trust everyone on the net, or at least their system administrator.) Times have changed and the majority of email messages are spam.
Even when attempting to sent bounce messages there are conditions which prevent sending of the reply. These should mainly be problems with the originating domain.
The only safe time to bounce a message is before it has been accepted. Many servers accept all messages and only later verify whether they can deliver the message. Once the message has been accepted, it is likely the bounce will be sent to a domain that had their identity spoofed, and be considered back-scatter spam.
Another reason not to bounce messages, is to protect the list of valid email addresses. Bouncing message with no such user errors allows cleaning lists of potential email addresses. This simplifies targeted email campaigns which may be used for phishing.
Email that ranks significantly high on spam indicators is often just dropped. That is what happens to all the '419' scam messages I receive. Certain blacklists are considered reliable enough that your message may be just dropped.
Messages sent from a dynamic IP address is also likely to be dropped as the chances are well over 99% that it is spam. Sorry, there are a lot spambots out there on dynamic IP addresses. A static IP address with DNS passing reverse validation is likely to be valid.
Issues with delivery are best handled by working with your logs and their logs. You should be able to verify in your logs which server your message was delivered to. They should be able to verify from their logs what happened to your message.
There severs which will bounce your message back to you with various indications of the quality of your messages. For this to work you need to have incoming messages working. Then you can start working on outgoing messages.
I've posted somewhat extensively on Email. My article on Detecting Email Server Forgery lists some validation services. My original post on Running an Email Server is a bit of a rant as at the time I was dealing with a number misconfigured servers. Larger organizations are increasing applying policies contained in my http://www.systemajik.com/blog/email-policy/.
Best Answer
Bouncing back one mail might not be a good idea.
If the attacker is spoofing some one else address you will end up bouncing the emails to the spoofed address.
Other possible issue is that replies will generate traffic that might be bouncing back and forward between servers causing problems.
The most efficient way is to include his address in some anti-spam list if your company has one so the server blocks connections / drop emails from the originators. Or enable anti-spam techniques that might be diverse depending on the engine you use. Some send one email back to the originator asking for the originator to confirm he exists and is human by doing some actions... (most annoying ones...) if nothing is done the email is discarded...
If not a corporation email and you are using outlook.com / hotmail or gmail.com check in their web-mail site if there is spam classification / button, insert the emails that you are receiving as spam.
If other users are also complaining their algorithm will do the rest for you.