I’ve been a Thunderbird email user for years and before that was dedicated to David Harris’ Pegasus Mail. Both systems have excellent filtering and allow you to set up rules. One useful tool is creating canned responses, so that filtering on specific criteria sends back an automated, templated reply to the correspondent. I do use GMail, mainly to spam filter the dozens of legacy email accounts that I have accrued over the years, but I’m reluctant to rely on it as my sole means of email communication, not least because Google can lock you out of your account almost at random it seems.

Nevertheless, Google Labs are continuously adding new features to the product. Now, GMail has added canned responses to its web-based mail system. According to the blurb on Blogoscoped:

“Canned Responses offers two useful features in one: the ability to store emails as templates and the ability to automatically respond to emails using those templates.”

It looks like it could be useful in a “call center” environment where standardised responses to particular types of incoming message would be very useful. But, Blogoscoped points out that, as with all things Google Labs, you should be wary of the fact that “the feature may change, break or disappear at any time.”

You have to “enable” Canned Responses. Go to Gmail –> Settings –> Labs. Scroll down towards the bottom and highlight the enabled radio button for Canned Responses. Once you’ve done that you should see the “Canned Responses” tab when you next compose an email: