Q: What does it mean to “Bounce” an email?
A: When we bounce an email, we remove it from the inbox and add the “INBOX BOUNCER” label. You can review your bounced emails by looking for the “INBOX BOUNCER” label in your account.
Q: How do you let important email through to my inbox?
A: We send an email to unknown senders as soon as they email you, asking them to click a link if the email is urgent. If not, the email will be delivered as part of your email digest.
Q: When do you send my email digest?
A: We check once a day, and send your digest when there's something new for you to look at. A sender appears under “New bounced senders” in their first three digests, so you can decide whether to let them through. After that they're listed under “Recurring bounced senders”.
If only recurring senders have emailed you, we don't send a digest that day. Their emails are saved for your next digest, and if a week goes by without one, we send a weekly summary so you never miss an email. Every bounced email is also in the “INBOX BOUNCER” label in Gmail at any time.
Q: How do you determine what emails to bounce and what emails to let into my inbox?
A: We bounce emails from senders you haven't corresponded with in the past year, or senders that are on your block list. Senders you have emailed before and senders on your allow list get through to your inbox.
Q: Do you ever delete my emails, or send emails from my account?
A: No.
Q: Why does InboxBouncer need permission to "Read, compose, and send emails from your Gmail account"?
A: We need this permission to set the “INBOX BOUNCER” label on emails that we bounce for you. Unfortunately, due to this issue, it isn't possible to do this without this overly permissive scope: Requesting new OAuth scope: add/remove labels from Gmail messages. (To increase privacy focus: no 'read' permission, as with gmail.modify) .
If you know someone at Google who would be willing to fix the problem for us, we would love to use a less permissive scope for our connection to your GMail account!
InboxBouncer does not compose emails or send emails from your account. For free users, InboxBouncer only reads email headers (sender, subject, reply-to) and never reads the email body. Premium users who opt into AI-powered phishing detection will have email body content analyzed by our AI partner (OpenAI), but body content is never stored in our database.
Q: How does phishing detection work?
A: All users get rules-based phishing detection that checks email headers for suspicious patterns like reply-to mismatches, known phishing domains, and urgency-based subject lines. Premium users additionally get AI-powered analysis that examines the email body for sophisticated phishing attempts. The email body is analyzed in real-time and is never stored.
Q: I have another question. How can I contact you?
A: Email us at help@inboxbouncer.com.