WebWorkerDaily has 3 Handy Uses for Gmail’s Canned Responses Feature «:

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.

Whakate has posted their 2008 Web awards and we are pleased to announce that this humble site has been voted the best discussion group of 2008! We would like to thank our members and contributors for this amazing honor, and invite you all to join in the conversations to make 2009 an even better year.

See the Whakate site for the complete listing, and visit the other winners as well:

The Whakate Best of Web 2008 Award

The top websites in each category are as follows:

Best Online Publication 2008

Scientific American (Whakate Rank: 9 out of 10)

Best Blog 2008 (Career Effectiveness)

All Things Workplace (Whakate Rank: 8 out of 10)

Best Blog 2008 (Personal Effectiveness)

ZenHabits (Whakate Rank: 8 out of 10)

Best Blog 2008 (Personal Productivity)

Stepcase LifeHack (Whakate Rank: 8 out of 10)

Best Discussion Group 2008

Work. Life. Creativity (Whakate Rank: 8 out of 10)

Making Sense of Personal Development and Productivity

The goal of the Whakate eMonitor and the “Best Of Web Award” is to help our readers make sense of the plethora of personal development resources that exist on the web at a glance. Our calculation of the final score incorporates traffic ranking as well as article quality, and because most of our sources boast good traffic rankings, this allows the reader to immediately assess if a source is credible.

For example, scores of 8 and above will immediately inform readers that a source is both well-received and consistently provides high-quality content. A score of 6 implies that a source has occasionally interesting ideas (in rare cases, it may mean that a site has good content, but lacks readership at the moment).

For the scoring to be useful to our readers in the long term, we wanted the scoring methodology to remain relevant in the face of emerging ideas and changing trends in personal development movements, which is not an uncommon occurrence. Hence, this list will always be current and relevant for our readers.

We believe this “Best Of” list of resources to be authoritative voices in career effectiveness, personal effectiveness and personal productivity. As a result, these resources are of utmost value to Whakate’s readers, from the casual browser to personal development professionals such as life coaches, trainers or human resource professionals.

Visit the forum for more information, and be sure to stay tuned for a lot more exciting content and conversation in 2009!