Auto Reply to Only Certain Addresses in Gmail
Consider a scenario – You are away on vacation and want to send out of office mail as an automatic reply from Gmail but only to specific contacts.
Gmail’s vacation auto responder will not work in such situation. It will automatically reply to all incoming mails or mails from your contacts, but fails to create filters. However, we can use canned responses to auto-reply only to selected few.
To set auto responder email template, we have to first activate the canned response feature:
1. Go to Gmail’s setting.
2. Select the “Lab” tab. Here you have list of available experimental Lab features.
3. Now look for “Choose Canned Response…”.Enable it by radio button.
4. Click on save changes at the bottom of the page.
Now, we can create any number of email templates. Go to Compose, write the content and from the bottom right corner drop down, select Canned Response > New Canned Response to save it.
Whenever you want to use this canned response, just click on the same drop down from Compose window > Canned response > Insert.
Now we will create a filter to send automatically replies as canned response to chosen addresses
Filters are the powerhouse of Gmail. They allow you to create custom rules, through which you can virtually do anything in your mailbox. We will create a filter to group users and to send our canned response automatically. Follow these steps:
1. Go to Gmail’s search drop down screen
2. In the search criteria, put your colleagues emails separated by OR. You can also use * wildcard in the search. For example: *@ABCcompany.com OR john.doe@gmail.com OR *@yahoo.com search will resuld mails from anyone from ABC company and John Doe and anyone whose email ends with yahoo.com.
3. Click on “Create filter with this search ”
4. Check the box “Send canned response” and select your canned response template from the drop down box. Click on “Create Filter”.
That’s all! You’ve successfully created an out of office automatic email reply for selected people.
Related: Bookmark Your Searches in Gmail
Thanks for the great information. One question – How do you modify or delete a filter?
This doesn’t seem to work for me, it sends the ]]canned response to me.
about as much use as a chocolate tea pot ‘….no ‘Lab’ setting on my Gmail settings
Are you using G Suite? If so, your administrator needs to enable labs. Otherwise, Labs comes standard on personal gmail accounts.
https://www.bettercloud.com/monitor/the-academy/how-to-enable-and-disable-gmail-labs/
Is there a way to send canned responses as “reply all”? I have some emails that are filtered through a form that I always send the same reply to in order to schedule an appointment. I would like to be able to filter this to an automated response, but the individual’s emails are always different, the only common filter would be from the “no-reply” email that the form originates from.
Unfortunately, automated replies based on certain filters are not available in Gmail. But, I think we can develop and extesnion for that. Let me know if you would be interested.
Any ideas how to exclude an email address from receiving canned responses? We have a client who send internal office emails and always gets the canned response which is frustrating.
I dont see the option for canned responses at all…