In Mac OS X Lion, Apple removed the “Bounce Email” feature from the default Mail client, much to the amazement of some users. While the feature is no longer available through the user interface in Mail, you can create an Automator service that will bounce the selected emails in Mail just by clicking on an item in the Services menu.

A note on bouncing emails: Before we begin, we’d like to put a simple note here about why you may not want to bounce emails. Typically, spammers don’t use real email addresses when sending spam messages. When you bounce an email, you really aren’t deterring the spammer, you’re simply filling up the inbox of an innocent bystander whose email address is being used by spammers. That being said, bounced messages can often deter spammers who use real email accounts.

1. Create an Automator Workflow

The first step in building our Bounce Email service is to open Automator. Once opened, select “Service” from the project chooser drop-down menu.

In the workflow area, ensure that the top action is configured as “Service receives ‘no input’ in ‘Mail’.” Next, drag the “Get Selected Mail Messages” action into the workflow and choose “messages” from the drop-down menu in the action. Finally, drag a “Run AppleScript” action, and paste in the following AppleScript:

on run {input, parameters}

    tell application "Mail"

        repeat with eachMessage in input

            bounce eachMessage

            delete eachMessage

        end repeat

    end tell

end run

When you're finished, your workflow should look something like this:

To save this workflow as a Service, click File > Save. In the drop-down dialog, type the name of the service as you want it to appear in Mail (we chose “Bounce Email”), and then click Save.

2. Bouncing Emails

To bounce an email, simply select one (or multiple) messages in your Inbox, and then click Mail > Services > Bounce Email.

After a few seconds, the message that you had selected will be bounced and the message in your Inbox will be moved to the Trash in Mail. You won’t get a notification that the message has been bounced; however, if you send yourself a message and bounce it back, you will see that the script does, in fact, work correctly. Albeit a little slower than Apple’s bounce feature in previous versions of Mail.

Follow this article’s author, Cory Bohon on Twitter.