Do you long for the days when people engaged each other in a more personal manner; when hand-written notes were exchanged, or when most games involved at least two people, with neither staring at a monitor? If so, Gmail Canned Responses may not be for you.
Canned Responses, described by the developer as “email for the truly lazy”, offers a quick way to reply to at least a portion of the email flood inundating many of us daily. With Canned Responses, messages are drafted in advance and can be added to an email reply with just a couple clicks, or they can be set up as automatic replies to selected emails.
To activate Canned Responses, click Mail Settings in the toolbox.
Under the Labs tab, in the Search for a tab field, type the word canned. In the Canned Responses box, click the Enable radio button, and then Save Changes.
Then, compose an email, click the Canned responses link, and select New canned response…. That will bring up the response name dialog box (shown below in Firefox). Name the response and click OK.
Then, when you receive an email like the one below, hit Reply…
…and insert the appropriate Canned response.
To learn how to set this, or other Gmail features, to run automatically by creating filters, see the article, Block an Address in Gmail.
Thank you for your interest in this WorldStart article. Your email is very important to us. Please remain online….
~Kevin
I followed your directions, but, after composing a new email the option to select “canned responses” was not there for me to select. What did I miss? Thanks!
Colby,
I’m afraid I don’t know what happened. The only suggestion I can offer is to return to the Labs tab and make sure that Canned Responses is still enabled (did you perhaps neglect to Save Changes?). I disabled mine and enabled it again, just to see if there was a glitch, but found none. Good luck.