GMail Labs is On a Roll: Canned Responses

While most web mail services have remained largely unchanged over the last ten years or so, Google has been updating GMail on a near constant basis, whether it’s updating the core of the product or releasing new upgrades via the Labs.

Earlier this evening, they announced a new feature I can see myself using quite frequently called “canned responses.”

Just like it sounds, it’s the ability to offer pre-written responses for commonly written emails:
If you’re sick of typing out the same reply every time someone emails you with a common question, now you can compose your reply once and save the message text with the “Canned responses” button. Later, you can open that same message and send it again and again.

It couldn’t get any easier unless Gmail automatically pushed the Send button.
I’ve always preferred that people refer to me with the much more politically correct term “convenience enthusiast,” and given that I’m such a convenience enthusiast, I’m pretty glad that they’ve also included the ability to hook these autoresponses in to filters.

Several years ago, when I made the migration from Microsoft Outlook to GMail (due to the fact that my decade-long email archive was taking up a measureable percentage of my hard-drive space), the feature I missed the most was the ability to do custom responses based on what sort of emails I was recieving.

As I pointed out the other day, working for Mashable has swollen the amount of email I get on a daily basis to an almost unmanagable level, so this feature could go a long way towards simplifying this aspect of my life.

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