A colleague suggested I try Gmail’s Canned Responses tool, and while I was slightly sceptical at first, I’m now finding it a great time saver. The premise is very simple. Instead of saving a draft to be sent once, you can save a message without contact details and insert the text quickly and neatly into another email, however many times you want.
You’re probably thinking what I thought- software that lets you create a template to send out in two mouse clicks, an unlimited number of times? That sounds like a tool for spammers. However, there are plenty of perfectly legitimate uses for a Canned Response.
If you send the same email asking all employees to update their time sheets every month, store that text in a couple of clicks and save yourself a few minutes every time. As the name implies, Canned Responses can also be sent out as a reply, or a part of a reply. You can insert detailed directions to your office into any email, for example, or save the answers to frequently asked questions.
The tool can be combined with Gmail’s inbuilt filter tool to create customized replies to messages that match certain criteria. The out-of-office autoreply is familiar to most people these days, but this system goes much further. It lets you select incoming emails with certain keywords in them or those from certain sources and send out customized automated replies.
Messages from friends and family can get one autoreply and colleagues another- very handy if you don’t want to give out personal contact details to everyone- or you can filter out messages relating to a particular project and arrange an automatic Canned Response to those.
The best part is, actually using Gmail filters and Canned Responses is much simpler than I thought it would be. Like many busy people I love software that works intuitively, and in this case the Labs team have done an excellent job.
Canned Responses can be installed by clicking straight from a Gmail inbox to the Labs page (look for the blue wheel icon at the top right corner of your Gmail page) and the process is very quick. Even getting started with the filters is surprisingly straightforward. You won’t need to spend hours figuring out how to select the messages you want.
Jess Spate is an online business consultant, working for companies as diverse as North London Loft Conversions and white furniture specialists.
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