There is a new feature for Gmail, which will allow users to create a “canned response”. This means you will be able to save a message that you are likely to send a number of times. Gmail engineer Chad Perry gives the example of being on paternity leave and leaving the following response “in the can”:
Hello, you’ve reached Chad’s mailbox. Thanks for your email about the latest Labs feature: Canned Responses, or email for the truly lazy. I’m on paternity leave so I won’t be able to respond personally. Instead, I hope you’ll enjoy this automated message.
Once you add the feature, you can use it by writing a reply to any message and simply saving the canned response, which stores it in a pulldown menu that you can later grab it from:
There’s a good possibility that you’ll want to set your canned responses to send automatically though, so you don’t have to worry about doing any of the repyling. You can do this by setting a filter to send a specified canned response based on particular variables in incoming messages.
The canned responses feature joins features like “custom label colors”, the “mark as read button”, the “go to label”, the “forgotten attachment detector”, and a number of others. If you’re a Gmail user, but not familiar with the Gmail labs options, you can choose from any or all of them to add to your account by going to settings and clicking the “Labs” tab.
