Here are three ways to use Canned Responses that will benefit both the sender and the receiver:

Send out smart autoresponders. What I love about Gmail’s canned responses is that unlike most autoresponder features from other free webmail providers, you don’t have to send the same automated email to everyone who sends you anything. By using canned responses hand-in-hand with Gmail’s filters, you can trigger Gmail to send out a specific response based on an incoming email’s keywords, who the the sender is, and other criteria.

This feature comes in handy for me because I provide free advice via email for one of my nonprofit blogs. Since it’s a low priority project, it often takes me a few days before I can give a sensible response to the readers who want to consult with me.

The online form that readers use to contact me sends me an email with the subject “Contact Form Results FP”. Here’s how I was able to create a filtered autoresponder (feel free to adapt the instructions based on your needs):

Sending contracts and other paperwork. Online freelancers regularly send out contracts and other documents to their clients. Emails that have these documents as attachments often include at least a basic description of each attached file. You can use Canned Responses to handle this repetitive task for you so you don’t want to type these instructions over and over again, or even copy and paste it from a text file.

What creative things can you come up with for using these Canned Responses for your e-mail needs? Discuss in the forum.