I’m here at the office, and I was showing Travis my email on Apple Mail. I got a spam message and bounced it. He didn’t know that you could do that, so I thought I’d post a bit about this cool trick.

You know when you send an email to someone, but you screwed up and wrote the wrong email address? It bounces back to you saying that the message was not sent correctly. So, I hear you ask, why would this ever be useful. Well for two reasons. The more innocent being that when you get spammed, you don’t want people to keep sending you spam. If you bounce a spam email, the spammer gets a notice that the message did not arrive. They’ll think the email address doesn’t exist and move on. This is great for you because you get less and less spam since spammers don’t think you exist. The less innocent reason is that you have some “friend” who sent you something, and you really really don’t want to “know” what they wrote. Just bounce the email, and it will look like you never got it.

“Oh sorry, I didn’t make it to your party. I must never have got your email.”

Or even better, “Sorry professor, I never got the email you sent me that the schedule changed, and we have a test today.”

Let’s now walk through the super simple process of adding this to Apple Mail. Open Mail. Then click on “View” in the menubar. Select “Customize Toolbar…”

Now you’ll be presented with a sheet that lists all the possible buttons to place on the toolbar. In the third row is an icon that reads “Bounce to sender.” Drag that to your toolbar. You now can close that sheet.

Now whenever you want to bounce an email, select in it Mail and then just click bounce. You’re all done.

Hope that helps.