Are there some email responses that you send quite regularly? Perhaps you are replying to the same questions over and over again, for example:
- What are the service times for your church?
- What are the bank details to give to the church?
- Can you add me to the list to receive the weekly email newsletter?
- I’d like to join the church - how do I do this?
- I want to become a Christian - how do I do this? (wouldn’t it be great if that were a common question!)
If you have ever had the need to write the answer to the same question twice, you might benefit from using Google’s canned responses. Launched in 2008, I only just discovered this handy tool a couple of week’s ago when a friend put me onto it.
Canned responses allows you to save a response to easily re-use it on another occasion. They save you from re-typing the email from scratch. They save you from having to dig around to find the response you gave to the same question three months ago.
Of course, you can adjust any of the response to customise them as you need, and you can add text before, after or in the middle of the canned response, but simply having the pre-written response on-hand can be a real time-saver. Other uses of this tool including adding signatures to the bottom of emails, or creating templates for weekly roster reminders, or weekly emails to your Bible study group.
If you use a Mac, but don’t use email, you might like to try out a tool called TextExpander (explained in more detail, along with some other email tips, in ‘8 tips for email liberation’).
But if you don’t use Gmail, perhaps it’s time you switched - there’s lots of benefits to using this tool to manage your email!
It’s easy to import your email to Google from another web-based email account (e.g. Hotmail), and even if you don’t want to use a Gmail account, you can send and receive your email, using the Gmail interface, by importing your mail settings.
