Gmail Labs: making e-mail better, one feature at a time

Those who love Gmail just got another reason to love it even more: Canned Responses, a small Gmail tweak that lets you save responses and then paste them into any reply. If you find yourself repeatedly answering the same question,…

Those who love Gmail just got another reason to love it even more: Canned Responses, a small Gmail tweak that lets you save responses and then paste them into any reply. If you find yourself repeatedly answering the same question, this little gem is for you.

Canned Responses is available through the Settings link in Gmail. Click it, then click Labs, and scroll down until you find it. There is not a lot of detail on that page, but more info is available here. 

Google, being the funny folks they are, tag this feature as "Email for the truly lazy" but that actually misses the point. Studies estimate business people spend one to two hours per day reading, responding to, deleting, forwarding and sorting e-mail, and I think that may even be an understatement. A recent New York Times article suggests that workplace information overload is a US$65 billion drain on the American economy.   

So anything that shaves a little time of your daily e-mail load is a good thing. For example, I often receive inquiries about my magazine’s editorial calendar, specifically about the special supplements, and a few times a week I find myself replying with the same message detailing who to contact. Canned Responses was launched just yesterday and already this morning I have one set up for those messages.

The feature also lets you link a Canned Response to a filter, so a specific sender or keyword can trigger an automatic reply.

Which brings us to a caveat regarding this feature: as great as this is, it can be overused. While efficiency is important so too is personalized communication, and colleagues who repeatedly receive a canned response from you may become annoyed. There is even more danger of this if you link a response to a filter: with the message going out automatically, you may be annoying people without even realizing it. 

Here’s a bonus tip regarding Gmail Labs: while you’re there, also check out the Forgotten Attachment Detector. It scans your e-mail before sending it, looking for mention of an attachment. If you didn’t attach anything, a small pop-up asks if you meant to do so. It’s not perfect: if you write "I am attaching that Word doc" it will note if you did not actually attach it, but if you write "Here’s that Word doc I promised you" there is no pop up.

But even with that imperfection, if it saves me one "Sorry, I forgot, here’s the attachment" e-mail per week, it’s worth it.

Peter Wolchak
Backbone magazine