Do you have to send the same email to many individuals on different dates? If this is a common experience, it is worth learning how to use Google Canned Responses.
Here is my situation so you get the idea. Cindy and I offer a free online resource (book) focused on participatory web applications in K12 settings. The book is part of a suite of resources some of which allow users to contribute material. For security reasons, we want to make certain that those who have access to this content and who can add comments or links are educators. Our biggest problem has been scammers who add links to unrelated commercial sites. We are using a protection scheme that requires users to authenticate (within Drupal) using an email address associated with an educational institution.
I find myself sending a large number of emails to applicants who do not provide an appropriate address. This may happen 5-10 times a day. I end up typing a similar message into each of these emails. I heard an explanation of a Gmail feature during a podcast that allows the insertion of a stored comment in an email, but could never find the feature. Today, I happened across a comment from Google on “lab” features and found that “canned response” was a lab product. I have now had an opportunity to explore and here are some instructions if this feature sounds useful. I do not claim mastery but I have been able to get the feature to work. For all of the great tools Google provides they do not seem to invest a lot of effort in tutorials. I guess this comes with “free”.
Canned Responses
The feature I thought was available and could not find within Gmail is called Canned Responses. The feature must be enabled before it is available. Hence, the explanation for why I could not locate it. To activate canned responses, a Gmail user must go to settings and open the “Lab” features (be forewarned lab features potentially may be changed, may not work, or may be discontinued). I guess this is the way Google coders experiment with features and you are invited to participate. Any given AVAILABLE lab feature must be enabled before it is available.
It then took me a while to see what changed when the feature was enabled (again, do not expect a tutorial explaining how to use the different lab features – you have to search and explore).
Finally, I found something with pictures and it became obvious that Canned responses had something to do with the “Canned responses” link that had appeared under the Subject dialog box available when composing an email. Here I am still a little uncertain. What I finally got to work may employ some behaviors that psychologists refer to as superstitious behaviors – some things are necessary, some are not, but the actor does not know which is which. The Canned responses link opens up a box revealing “Insert, Save, and Delete). Under Save, there is an option for “new canned response”. So, I wrote the response I wanted to use repeatedly, used the save now button (this is normally used to save a draft), selected the “new canned response” option and generated a label for my response. I then started over as if I was going to write a new email, went to “canned responses” and selected the entry now available under insert. It seemed to work.
I admire the exploratory nature of the Google approach. Some serious folks probably would be frustrated by the exploratory nature of things and the lack of clear documentation. Too time consuming. I think exploring with Google is worth the effort.
