You might fool cousin Ned but no spammer is going to be fooled by a MW bounce message.

Aside from ex-girl/boy friends and inlaws the bounce is of limited use these days. Worse sorting out all the forged reply addresses so the spammer doesn't get you to help them harass an innocent person by plugging their address into the spam takes a lot of effort.

With that kind of thinking, might as well create a catch-all on your server and don’t bounce any mails at all, even it they are for non existent accounts. That way you won’t hurt any innocent persons by real bounces.

A personalized bounce message would be very nice. Mark S.

I would like to be able to cut and paste the text of an actual bounce message from my ISP into MW, and specify the parts that should show the sender's email and current date and time. This would be more legit looking than the simple bounce message, and would deter some more persistent email stalkers.

I'd like to have -3 votes. This option is useless and should never have been put in the MW program in the first place. Spammers never use real email accounts or real email servers. So bouncing them has no effect. When a spammer has forged my email addresses I've received thousands of bounce messages in a day.

Tony Toews.

Interesting that this suggestion has received so many votes. I agree with Stan and "Anonymous" above - the bouncing feature is of limited usefulness, so "enhancing" it is just putting lipstick on a pig. Better to spend time making it harder to use, rather than easier or more "realistic". Or don't spend time on it at all.

In response to this:

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Anonymous
Thursday 15th of October 2009 7:40am

With that kind of thinking, might as well create a catch-all on your server and don’t bounce any mails at all, even it they are for non existent accounts. That way you won’t hurt any innocent persons by real bounces.
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A properly configured mail server will not generate any bounce messages in response to incoming spam, it will only generate ones to local users who have sent undeliverable mail.

http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/329.html#bounces
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If it has to stay do something to mitigate the damage caused by bouncing to a forged address, at a minimum check SPF and if it fails disable the bounce.

Although I agree that you don't want t bouce to forged addresses, there are nuicance emails from confirmed senders who basically spam us, that this function would come in very useful for, especially if it could be personalized as another commenter suggested. A similar feature can be set up with an auto responder and filter where you have certain email addresses redirected to an email account specifically for capturing the offending emails and autoresponding with a bounce like message, but that's a hassle to set up. So I vote to have this feature refined and made more flexible so it can be judiciously used -- perhaps include a warning and instruction that nuisance emails and spam should be or must be sender confirmed before using the feature. It could be very useful if further refined as above.

I absolutely agree with "Anonymous" above. I have received a lot of messages from magazines, and other people offering services that I am not interest in, and I would like to have this feature refined, so I can answering then with customized message (a warning and a promise of prosecution, case them do not remove my e-mail from their list) in my language (portugues do Brasil).
I consider this one, the most important sugestion of all.

I agree that bouncing to forged addresses is a red herring - people can bounce mail from addresses they know are real.

I agree.
I have received a lot of messages with fake email adress, so after bouncing "returned mail: User unknown"!
Nowadays spammers are using a "List-Unsubscribe" too.
If was possible I suggest a new MWP feature to insert manually IP's to block (list "subscribed") and bounce to them automaticly (real email adress).

The bounce feature, used appropriately, is one of the more important discriminators of mailwasher - I would support enhancements that make it more useful. To those who claim it is useless, don't use it.

Je regrette que la fonction "bounce" n soit plus aussi simple qu'avec l'ancienne version.

I believe bouncing has helped reduce my spam. I still believe that some spamming do use real addresses, and their software isn't smart enough to sort out the phony bounces from the real bounces. Spammers make money by flooding the net with spam. If their software believes my address is bad, why would they continue to send to it. What usually happens it my address gets sold, that a new wave begins but then dies down. Maybe from my bouncing, maybe not, but it seems to help for me. When I don't bounce I notice an increase in spam.

Perhaps this is something that should be left to the individual to choose to use or not for whatever the reasons, but that means the feature needs to be supported. After all, those asking for it probably paid for the product. Also, if paying people don't get what they way, then they will do elsewhere, including building their own clone software. MailWasher is a product, made by a company to make money not to moderate people’s behavior on the Internet.

For some reason, when I used the bouce in 6.5, it actually reduced the number of spam, and it is going back up with me switching back to the 2011 version. Perhaps I'm the target of some really stupid spammers, but I'm all for anything that works and it seems to have an effect. And yes, for some forms of mails it would be handy to have this feature more configurable so you would have something like a autoresponder, sometimes saying 'I'm not here, really' and sometimes say 'until you confirm your address, this mail is not going to reach' So for me, this is one of the few really must-haves