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:
- Set up an email address on my domain and have it forward to my Gmail account.
- 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.
- Click “Next Step”. I checked off “Skip the Inbox”, “Apply the label:” and selected the label I wanted, and “Send Canned Response”.
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.- 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.
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I already have a canned response set up for hosting registrations, but I hadn’t thought of using a filter to make it automated. I’ll have to try it, thanks for this post.
The leads from my website ( value your trade, Online App, price quote ) are collected by the site host Auto One Media. They are then forwarded to my Gmail where I have my filters set up to send a different auto responce for each one. My problem is that when the autoresponder message goes out. It gets sent to Autoonemedia.com instead of the customer who inquired. How do I fix this? Thank you in advance for your time.
Chris,
Awesome article. I love canned responses as well. My biggest issues with gmail is the vacation autoresponder which doesn’t have a delay build in. I had to go and create my own program for that.