Gmail – Can You Bounce Messages Instead of Forwarding?

gmail

Prima facie this is impossible but perhaps someone has some kind of hack to do it. This is one of the last things holding me back from switching to Gmail from Pine.

To be clear, bouncing a message is like forwarding but leaving all the headers intact. It sort of amounts to spoofing the email, which perhaps is why Gmail doesn't support it. To the recipient of a bounced email, it seems as if they were just BCC'd.

Best Answer

Sam Ruby posted a workaround:

  • From the message dropdown, select Show original, then from the browser select Save Page As....
  • With a text editor, find the line containing X-From_:. Copy this line to the top of the file, then modify that first line by removing the X- and _: characters. Save the file.
  • Now you case use mutt on that file (example: mutt -f mail.google.com) and use the b command to bounce the message. Enter the name of the mailing list (example: public-html@w3.org), press enter and then y to confirm.