So we can’t live without emails. Emails are supposed to help us save time by making our communication effective. We communicate and collaborate with people across the world via email.
But email takes quite an amount of time in our everyday schedule to keep up and maintain – sure it DOES help with making our communication effective. But then, it also takes our time.
For some it drives us crazy. Given the volume of emails that need our attention everyday, at the end of the day, we start to wonder if email is really helping us save time.
But wait, let’s see how we can save some time in responding to emails by using the Canned Responses feature in Gmail.
What are Canned Responses in Gmail?
Canned Responses is a Gmail labs feature that helps you create pre-written email templates. I use this pretty heavily for writing similar responses to my clients, guest blogging submissions, product related questions, registration requests (at my blogging community DoSplash) and so on.
With Canned Responses, I can simply type a standard response/reply and save it under Canned Responses. And then when you need to respond to an email you can simply choose from the list of Canned Responses that you have (name them aptly so you can find them easily), and click on it.
The pre-writte email response will be pasted. If you want you can simply add the name of the person you are sending the reply to, in the salutation and just click send.
Using this feature I send lots of emails in a very less time! I would otherwise be spending hours if I had to type those emails every time manually.
So, how to set up Canned Responses in Gmail?
I assume you are logged into your Gmail account. Click on the gear icon on the right, select Settings and then choose Labs.
Under Labs, search for Canned Responses and make sure it is enabled!
That’s it, you have now set up Canned Responses in Gmail. But you cannot use it until you create a few pre-written templates that you can use.
How to use Canned Responses in Gmail?
Just compose a new mail or click on “Reply” to any of the emails that you’d want to respond to. Type your response inside the email window and click on the downward arrow at the bottom right (as shown below) and then hover on Canned Responses. You will have an option to “Save” your typed email as a response.
Give it an appropriate name and click save. That’s it.
You can have as many canned responses as you like – just make sure you name them appropriately so you can easily identify them and insert that particular message when you need it.
In order to use an already saved Canned Response, do the same in your new email compose window or the reply window, select Canned Responses from the downward arrow and choose one of the saved messages under “Insert” – this is important!
If you choose one of the titles under “Save” you will replace the already saved template with the current one (although you will get a confirmation popup!). So you have to choose the appropriate message under “Insert”.
Save time with Canned Responses in Gmail
I hope you found this tutorial useful. I use this feature heavily! And I seriously save tons of time in my everyday routine. And with this feature, I don’t find replying to emails to be a daunting task!
Try this out and let me know if you find this feature useful! And, don’t forget to share this post with your friends!