Etan Horowitz | November 11, 2008
OUT of office messages are great when you want to send the same reply to everyone, but what if you want to send certain replies to certain messages? You could copy and paste the same text over and over into emails, but if you use Gmail you can automate this process.
- When you are logged into your inbox, click Settings, then Labs. Scroll down and enable Canned Responses, then scroll down to the bottom to save your changes. You should now see a little green icon at the top of your inbox.
- To compose a canned response, start a new email message and type the response you want to send in the body. When finished, click the drop-down arrow next to Canned Responses and select New Canned Response. Give your response a title and click OK to save it.
- Your canned response will now be available whenever you are composing a new message, replying to a message or forwarding a message.
To use it, just click on the drop-down arrow next to Canned Responses and choose the one you want. The response will then be pasted into your message.
- To have a canned response automatically sent when you get a certain type of message, go back into your Gmail settings and click the Filters tab. Fill out one or more of the blank fields to specify the attributes for messages to include in your filter (ie, from a certain person, containing certain words in the subject line or body). The more specific you are, the better. Click to test the search to see how many of your existing messages would have been included in this filter. If it's a lot, you may want to revise the terms in the fields. Click Next Step.
- Now check the box next to Send Canned Response and choose the response you want to automatically send to messages that meet your criteria. You can also choose to do other things with those messages, such as automatically mark them as read. When finished, click Create Filter. Try sending yourself a message with the specific text to make sure it works.
One downside is the recipient of your automated canned response will see the words canned response as part of your email address, but they can respond.
MCT