If you find yourself typing the same email response over and over again, such as a support request asking for instructions on how to do something, or a confirmation email to customers letting them know you’ve received their message, canned responses in gmail can help you save time and typing.
The idea is that you compose an email with the ‘generic’ reply and save it to your gmail drafts. later, you can quickly insert that preformatted template into your email body with one click without having to manually type the entire response.
However, there are 4 major limitations with gmail canned responses.
- You may not include attachments in your autoresponder emails.
- Canned responses are only available on the gmail website. if you use gmail on android or ios, or use an email client like microsoft outlook, you’re out of luck.
- there is no option to auto reply to messages in bulk. For example, you can’t select multiple emails in gmail and reply to them all with the same template. you will have to reply one by one manually.
- you can easily set gmail filters to auto-reply to emails, but recipients will easily know that you have sent an auto-reply. that’s because gmail adds ‘canned.response’ in the sender email. for example, my email is amit@labnol.org but if I use autoresponders, the sender will appear as amit+canned.response@labnol.org.
meet email autoresponder for gmail, a new google plugin that works like canned responses but without any of the above limitations. check out this youtube video (mp4) for a quick tour.
how to use gmail auto reply
- create one or more draft messages in gmail. you can apply formatting, include logo images, attachments, and even put html signatures on your messages.
- Install the gmail plugin, then inside the spreadsheet go to plugins > email autoresponder > create a new rule to get started.
- create mapping rules with the wizard similar to how you create filters in gmail.
For example, you can have a rule that automatically replies to all emails tagged as “FAQ” with a particular draft message. or create an advanced rule that will send an automated reply only to unread messages in your inbox that are newer than ‘n’ days and have the word ‘support’ somewhere in the subject line. in fact, you can use any of gmail’s advanced search operators to create such a rule.
once you have created the rules, the plugin will work in the background. it will fire once an hour, search for matching gmail messages and reply automatically using the corresponding draft template. If you have multiple email accounts, such as a work and personal email account, you can choose to reply from any of your gmail-connected email aliases.
The plugin runs once every hour, but if you can’t wait that long, go to manage rules, select the relevant rule from the dropdown, and choose run to send the autoresponders right away.
once a reply has been sent, the gmail plugin applies the “replied” tag to the email thread so you know the email has been processed and will be skipped in the next iteration.
using gmail auto reply on mobile
If you need to reply to an email on a mobile device with a prewritten template, simply open the email and apply a gmail tag that you specified at runtime. when the plugin runs in the next hour, it will automatically reply to that message with the corresponding draft.
after setting the rules you can close the google sheet and it will continue to run in the background. simple.
automatically reply to multiple emails at once
Let’s say you have 10 emails in your inbox that you need to automatically reply to with a message that’s already saved as a draft in your gmail. apply any common tag to all these messages and then create a rule for this particular tag using the plugin. then go to manage rules, select the rule from the dropdown and click run to automatically reply to all tagged messages at once.
see also: mail merge for gmail with scheduler