How to send personalized auto responses with gmail

For gmail users. Imagine the following scenario: you want to give to reply to every email you receive from a particular email (the well known trick of "+something" after you name will is very useful), subject or contains particular words. For instance you want to acknowledge the reception of and email with the subject "Support request" with the text

"Thanks for your request. We will process it shortly"

A few months ago there wasn't a way you could do this. You could have used the vacation auto response but that would apply for all your incoming email with no room for fine tuning.

I have recently come across a way to do it using canned responses. Canned responses is a Google labs functionality

In order to send personalized auto responses canned responses have to be enabled. It can be done in Setting and under the Labs tab.

 

 

Once you have it enabled you will have to create the canned response. To do that  just compose a normal email message with the text you want to be used and save it as a canned response.

After create a filter with the criteria you want to use for the autoresponse, such as all emails sent to particular address (for example the address where forms filled by user are send -remember the "+" trick-) or mails with a particular subject, etc

and select "send canned response" with the message you want to sent:

 

Voilà. That's all. In this particular example the sender of the email will receive and email with your canned response. Note two shortcomings of this procedure.

1. This message won't be a response (therefore will not include the original message in this email)

2. The sender's email will be your and will be include  "+canned.response"

Let's hope Google solves this two issues then it will be perfect!!!

TF