I am a Gmail fan. Their filters are awesome and I find that the feature set is ideal for managing my online business. One of the things that I recently did was set up an email address which, when used by a reader, would result in an automatic email reply. I did this using the new “canned response” feature in the Gmail Labs.

The canned response function allows you to set up just that – canned responses. Instead of having to type an entire email to somebody even when you’ve typed the same email many times before, you can use a canned response to simply insert the message and send. Huge time saver.

Using Gmail filters, however, you can use the canned response function to send an auto-reply only when certain criteria are met. So, here’s what I did:

1. Set up an email address on my domain and have it forward to my Gmail account.
2. Set up a filter with the “TO” address as the incoming email address. Note that you can set up your criteria to be anything you want, be it a certain subject line, certain sender, or even if the email contains certain words.
3. Click “Next Step”. I checked off “Skip the Inbox”, “Apply the label:” and selected the label I wanted, and “Send Canned Response”.
4. If the canned response option has no options, you’ll need to create one first. It is a bit counter-intuitive (but, hey, this is a Labs feature for a reason), but you need to go compose a new message, type your canned response, then without sending it use the dropdown option to save the message as a canned response. Then, just discard the message. When you go back to your filter, you will now have that canned response in the selection box.
5. Save the filter.

Now, when anybody emails this address I set up, it will forward to Gmail. Gmail will then move it swiftly into the label I specified and auto-reply with the canned response.