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So you’ve got a shiny new Gmail account, you’ve created filters (see last post), you’re inbox is lean and tidy and you’re quite proud of yourself. But wait, what’s this? In your enthusiasm to tell the world how cool and tech savvy you are you’ve gone and splashed your email address all over the interweb and a week later your inbox looks like the inside of a London phone booth. Bugger. What you gonna do?

Well you lucky sausage, since you were smart enough to get yourself a Gmail account in the first place then believe it or not, you now have the amazing ability to create an auto-responder that will fire back an email of your creation to whoever you so desire. Just imagine what your fertile mind could conjure up to reply to all those laughably misspelled emails from the spam javelin spammers! Or perhaps you just want to send an email with a link to your site. Either way, setting up an auto responder is a pretty nifty way to gain free promotion with practically zero effort!

So here’s how you do it.

1. First, click on “compose mail” in the upper left of the screen

2. Now simply type the email you want to send out. It could be something like:

Hi and thanks for the email!

I’d really love to

(a) try your product to enlarge my penis/breasts/ass  - delete as appropriate

(b) send you money via Western Union so you can send me my huge inheritance from the Nigerian Uncle I didn’t know I had

(c) Buy your untested medical miracle cure for baldness/impotence/obesity  -  delete as appropriate

But I won’t because I’m not a complete dickhead.

Have a nice day.

Or you could simply say:

Hi and thanks for your email

I’ll be sure to read it and get back to you as soon as I can.

In the meantime, why don’t you take a look at my site/blog/idea  -  delete as appropriate

Speak soon!

http://yourwebsitelinkhere.com

2. Once you’ve done that, click on the link that says “canned response”, it’s next to the “attach a file” link, and select New canned response.

3. Give your new email a name, like  – Thanks but jam it, or something equally profound, then click OK and you’re done. You can then discard the draft email as you’ve already saved it as a Canned Response.

4. Now all you need to do is select how you want to filter a particular email. So for example if you constantly get emails from a particular source, you can set up a filter for that incoming address or group of keywords then check  “skip the inbox” and then “send canned response”. Then just select your new response that you saved earlier and viola! You need never even have to look at another oddly spelled subject line again!

Now granted, you need to set up a filter for each of the different undesirable sources you get your junk from, but remember you can also use a selection of keywords to filter them, so you should try that before trawling through your junk mail and see what works.

It has been mentioned to me that this method means you’re responding to spam which could be an invitation to receive more but if you set up your filters properly it really shouldn’t cause a problem.

Gmail actually has a very good spam filter, but this technique is great for those sneaky little blighters that manage to squeeze through the net!

Have fun setting up your auto-responder and as always, let me know if you liked this post by leaving a comment!