MailBounce
... make my Mozilla bounce
(c) 2003 Hans-Georg Eßer <h.g.esser [at] gmx.de>
release: 0.1
date: 2003/06/08
license: GPL (see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html)
Description:
MailBounce adds a bounce (redirect) feature to Mozilla/Netscape (and possibly
other mail clients) that does the same as the bounce feature
of console mail clients such as mutt. When a mail is bounced,
its content isn't touched or marked with ">", and the From:
address isn't changed either - so a reply to a bounced mail
will go to the original mail sender, not to the bouncing person.
Bouncing is a variation of forwarding, the main difference is that
a forwarded mail is always significantly different from the original
mail, while the bounced mail tries to stay as close to the original
as possible.
To bounce a mail can be useful e.g. in companies where support
or other requests are collected in a central mail folder and
then manually bounced (instead of forwarded) to experts who are
going to deal with the mails.
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Download:
bounce-0.1.tgz
Requirements:
- Sendmail or a similar MTA must be installed locally and setup
in a way that it can send external mails (i.e., you might have
to configure it to handle SMTP-AUTH, see e.g.
http://sdb.suse.de/de/sdb/html/fhassel_smtp_auth.html
(german) or the english version
http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/fhassel_smtp_auth.html. [[ sorry: links were
broken when I checked them on 2006/08/30 -- that is a
Suse-Novell-transition problem ]]
- You must have Mozilla/Netscape (or whatever other mail client
you want to use with bounce) configured to send mails through
the local mail server (localhost:25). It must also be configured
to send mails as attachments.
Depending on how the mail is attached by the mail client, this
tool might break. I've only tested it against Mozilla 1.4.
- This script was tested on SuSE Linux 8.2 with Python 2.2.2
installed, but older Python versions might do as well.
In any case, Python is required since this is a Python
script ;)
Setup:
For a quick setup become root and execute
./setup.sh
in this directory. This will do three things:
- It will copy bounce.py to /usr/local/bin.
- It will create a new user account bounce which will be later
used to forward mails to.
- It will copy bounce.forward to ~bounce/.forward.
Usage:
Once the script is installed, you can use MailBounce this way:
Select a mail you want to bounce, click the "Forward mail" button (mail
must be forwarded as attachment), set To: field to "bounce@localhost"
and put the recipient of the bounced mail into a Reply-To: field.
Set no further To:, Cc:, Bcc:, etc. fields.
When you click "Send", the mail will be sent to bounce@localhost.
Sendmail will pick up the .forward file and run the mail through
bouncy.py, which in turn will extract the attached mail and change
some of the header fields:
- The From: header gets an addition of
(by way of YOUR NAME)
so that a recipient will see that the mail was bounced and
by who.
- The To: header gets the address you provided in the
Reply-To: header (which is being removed from the outgoing
mail).
- An Apparently-To: header is created, showing the original
To: address of the mail that was bounced.
Problems:
This is certainly a very early release. I wanted a bounce feature
for Mozilla, I checked the Mozilla feature requests and found
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12916
Apparently the bounce feature isn't implemented yet, so I created
a quick and dirty solution. It hasn't been tested anywhere except
for my own machine, and it was only tested with a few sample
e-mails - it worked well enough for me.
I shall happily integrate any improvements, corrections, or
enhancements (e.g. support different types of forwarding, etc.).
If someone comes up with a better way than forwarding the mail with
to:bounce and reply-to:bounce-recipient (which isn't really a
natural choice), I'll be happy to hear about that as well.
It is poorly documented, but with there only being very few lines
of code I thought it mostly obvious what's happening.
Author and project homepage:
Mail: Hans-Georg Eßer <h.g.esser [at] gmx.de>, 2003/06/08
Homepage: http://privat.hgesser.com/software/MailBounce/
My comment: If you find this tool useful, let me know :)
Last modified: Sun Jun 8 01:56:22 CEST 2003
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