Gmail has been a really useful email service and there are 100s of things you could do with it, however there are several features which are not really well known, here is a interesting tip that we are sure many users may not be aware of. This tip involves sending custom auto-replies in Gmail.

Many of you may already have heard of vacation responders, where a auto-reply is sent to emails sent to you, which may say that you are unavailable at the moment and will get back to the email after a certain date.

You can send out a vacation responder with Gmail too, but these messages will go out to each and every email you receive or to all the contacts in your address book. However there is way to send out auto-responders to only select few people or to emails matching certain criteria.

Using this cool trick you you can also send out custom messages to different people based on email address or subject or body content. For example if you receive blog contact form emails to your account, you can easily send a auto-response thanking the user for their email. Keep reading to learn how you can do that.

Steps for Sending Custom Auto-replies in Gmail

Step 1: Activate Canned Response Gmail Labs feature by visiting Settings –> Gmail Labs and enable Canned Responses.

Step 2: Compose a dummy mail and click on the Canned response link and select “New Canned Response”, enter the name of the canned response.

Step 3: Continue writing the message you want to right and click on the save canned response once you have finished composing the message. Repeat steps 2 and 3 if you want to create multiple canned responses.

Step 4: Click on the create filter link on the top of the page.

Step 5: In the options that appear, enter the appropriate search criteria for filtering emails. For example if you want email from certain email address to be send out a custom reply, enter it in the from box, if you want emails with certain subject to be sent out a custom reply enter it in the subject box, and so on. You do not need to fill out every criteria, and can create the filter using just a single criteria.

Step 5: Click on the Next Step button and select the checkbox next to “Send canned response” and select the canned message you want to send out for emails that match this criteria.

Hope you enjoyed the tip and will put it to good use, as a part our series for making Gmail more easier for our users, we will be sharing several tips and tricks, so that you can the best out of Gmail.

Want more tips on Gmail, visit the Gmail Tips section to learn more.