Google takes humans one more small step towards irrelevancy.
They released a new feature in Google Labs this evening that lets users create “canned responses” to emails. So if you find yourself typing the same response over and over again to emails, you can just create a canned response and use it repeatedly.
And they’ve also gone one step further…you can also set filters based on emails that contain certain keywords, or are from certain people, and automatically reply with a canned response. The result is a sort of smart auto-reply that actually addresses the received email’s contents but doesn’t have the downside of requiring the recipients to open, read or respond to it themselves.
So you can, for example, set up an auto response that replies to emails from your wife or girlfriend that simply say “You’re right, I agree and I’m so sorry. I love you!”
So of course we’ll be testing this by using two gmail accounts with filtered canned responses, each based on incoming emails from the other account. Theoretically emails should bounce back and forth between the accounts quickly and permanently, until one of the accounts runs out of storage. I wonder how long that will take? We’ll know soon.
Update: Here’s a funny attempt at the infinite response experiment. Somehow Google planned ahead. damn.
Interesting idea. Keep your readers up to date on the progress of this experiment.
It is always useful when you want to wish back ‘Happy Diwali’ or say ‘Thanks for your wishes’ to birthday wishes..
ok, Im member to Google Gmail.
i can´t stop laughing concerning the “girlfriend auto-reply”
good hint!
btw: i´m gonna start the “girlfriend auto-reply test”. right now
Yeah, right! –Unless she is extremely dumb, she will wise up right away, which will get you in trouble. Again.
Come to think of it… We are always in trouble, anyway. We might as well give it try just for fun!…
moin moin! i can now tell you that my “girlfriend auto-reply test” already failed. after the first auto-reply she called me and asked “hee? what do you want me to tell with “ja, ok”?”
) hmm.
so either she is smarter than gmail or her 7gb of space are already full?!
no, seriously i can´t recommend to do this at home!
This is really great idea.
i think we should start contest on best auto reply for the boss emails!
This will be useful like inserting messages like hello,I am busy like them while sending SMS messages in a mobile .
LOL at infinite bounce backs
Ya….
Nice one
What a fun little experiment, do let us know how it goes.
I think Google’s idea is not only good but typical of them. Between Google docs and calendars they’ve already made it pretty easy for little companies to set up an unofficial intra-net between their employees. This is just one more way Google is apply concepts that work in business to individual users to make things run smoother or more productively.
I like your experiment. Do share the result of your experiment
sad to hear that the only communication you might receive from a girlfriend/wife would point out your faults/wrongdoings such that your only reply would be an autoreply. personally i think sexism is backward technology but whatever blows your skirt up..
This is my first comment after months of subscribing, good post and the fun comment totally rocked my day.
I like the idea of have responses ready, a time saver.
“that replies to emails from your wife” – I guess only men use gmail then. Or perhaps it is only men who write for TechCrunch.
No Jill, it’s just that only men are capable of noticing and comprehending the words “for example”. Women just can’t get their pretty little heads around that kind of thing. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go drink beer and swear.
… drink beer, swear and pass gas. Go bro!
Fingers crossed they’ve bolted that particular door securely already. There was an old DOS attack that worked along those lines, only increasing exponentially (I think it was with Hotmail?).
Please don’t break Gmail – I quite like it.
Hey Mike, I just tried (and filmed) the experiment.
Results: http://yesthat....king-to-itself/
I didn’t think anything would happen:) I once tried the same thing but on two cellphones, forwarding the one to the other – it also didn’t work. I even tried it with 5 collagues, forwarding one phone to the other and creating a loop of 6 phones. It didn’t work
we tried that experiment years ago with gmail filters and didnt work. event making a circular chain with 4 or 5 accounts didnt work. so I wouldt expect this to work either.
HAHAHA great idea with the email bounce test. I wonder if gmails ever growing storage limit can keep up! You should attach a semi-large file to them to make it go quicker.
what pish! nothing more to say really, stupid idea implemented by stupid techs/geeks with no social life, or social skills or social graces or humanity.
the sooner google burns in the crunch the better, a new, leaner less megalomaniacal google will appear in its place, we can only hope!
See? Women cannot stand the idea/concept of men having fun. Or just taking a break. Guess it is a warped “mom” instinct in them.
Just for the sake of it, try this: at your girlfriend’s or if you are married, at home –lay on the couch just for a few seconds and you will be the immediate target of her wrath while, at the same time, she would find something [anything] for you to do…
you could do that bounce back and forth before with gmail filters like fer said, this canned response might be pretty useful, and for a lot of things… you could use it to say to people that e-mails concerning startups should go to startups@techcrunch and pitches should go to… without you having to do anything, or if you are out of touch with your mail you can put your friends e-mails in there and gmail will reply to them saying that you are out of town that they should txt you instead… stuff like that… much more than just bouncing and much more relevant for human contact than what you said… especially on your supposedly ever full mail box, it might help you be more helpful to someone else… especially if you find patterns on your e-mails for the filters… this was a silly post from you for a pretty kick ass feature…
What should be the canned response to my BOSS’s mail… I need a draft
how about allowing users to “tag” emails. so instead of just marking it with a star and forgetting why i marked it with a star – i should be able to add tags to the email while saving / marking it or putting a note – so i can easily retrieve the email at a later date when i need to find it amongst the many starred emails from the same user. Google r u listening?
I have arranged this for you, by magic *ping!*. I’ve called them ‘labels’ rather than ‘tags’, but they do everything you’ve asked for and more (colours, automation with filters etc.). Payment by way of hero-worship, please.
Best TechCrunch reply ever, Schmoo! I’m still laughing as I write this….. Oh, my.
i’m filing my patent on the above idea
This is nothing new, Thunderbird can do this for years:
=> addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/640
Gmail (and any other web email) can do it with iMacros:
https://addons....efox/addon/3863
ha ha ha..very funny experiment
This feature will be great for small businesses, but it doesn’t seem to be rolled out yet for Google Apps.
My bad, I missed that it needed to be enabled first.
dumb idea, for me.
Whats the difference between this and the auto-response (out-of-office) we’ve had for so long…?
as usually Google publishes “great” ideas, as something amazing, when we know they are pretty old!
Google, why dont you provide a semantic web search, or better yet, why dont you give up on your idea of lauching another browser (chrome) and help Mozilla guys improve their already excelent Firefox?
Makes more sense to me…does anyone share the same feeling?
I think the girlfriend/wife “tip” is irritating and sad. It’s an old joke, it presumes the reader is male and it reinforces stupid stereotypes of females as unrational and potentially non-technical (not able to determine an automated reply). I would appreciate if TechCrunch reporting didn’t include stuff like this.
It presumes you have a sense of humor.
which obviously she doesn’t.
[can't see the picture clearly. thought it was a guy -sorry]
TC is like a playground, for grown-up geeks [like me] –Very serious topics along with some that aren’t.
It is absurd for you to even suggest the possibility of censure.
Like a playground. If you can’t take it, get out of it. Move on, “mom.”
ha.. reminds me of the ‘out of office’ autoreply bug that Outlook had years back..
Techcrunch readers don’t have girlfriends or wives…this is crazy talk!
There! I said it. Now, if you excuse me, I have to get some lotion and get my right hand busy…
I see the folks at Gmail discovered procmail. Woo hoo!
Google should consider taking this a step further and suggesting canned responses based on what you’ve written in the past. It’d be interesting to discover what phrases appear over and over in your emails.
Furthermore, given the shear magnitude of emails google now has access too, it seems plausible that they could actually synthesize your replies for you. The danger, of course, is that one google-generated response could result in a second google-generated response, and so on and so forth until some colossal misunderstanding eventually occurs resulting in World War III.
if they can detect a cycle between 2 accounts try 4 or 5 i bet it’ll flood then lol unless actually…. they might be analyzing headers hmmm
It won’t work for the same reason you can’t get to accounts set up with vacation auto-responders to go into an infinite loop (of course I’ve tried it).
Google are smart enough to send these automated responses with the email header “Precedence: bulk”. This email header is used to stop auto-responders from responding to bulk mailings. It also works to stop infinite loops.
Yes it is a good idea, I’ve been enjoying it with Outlook/Exchange for the better part of a decade.
How full are those accounts getting?
when will Gmail start to get my coffee?
Not full at all. See Jon’s video test above.
http://yesthat....king-to-itself/
Which I guess proves the engineers at Google aren’t idiots. (Just in case you thought they were, Mike).
What a great way to spam people….
Relationship advice from Mike Arrington! Awesome!
So all joking aside Eudora had this feature 10+ years ago. It’s incredibly useful … imagine you run a popular mailing list and get the same kinds of questions over and over again … or you’ve posted something on Craig’s List and dozens of inquiries and don’t have time to reply to each one …
This is a very cool feature, and in fact AOL Mail has a similar feature called “Preset Messages” on our Mobile Mail product. When you’re replying to a message or composing a new one you can choose from several canned responses like “Call me on my mobile” or “I’m running late.” Mobile is a great place for this because its where people need it most.
And yes, I am a proud AOL employee who works on Email.
I tried it and it doesn’t work like I would expect. It just replaces the entire body rather than just inserting the canned text. stupid
GMAILIN’ {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/WwRuAPDDwY_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”GMAILIN’ ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/8JTEc2K6xG”}}}
Hmmm. So you tried to “automatically reply with a canned response” between two gmail accounts and not tried autoforwarding between them yet?
This is awesome! I reply to tons of “customer service” emails for my web sites every day via g-mail and most of the replies are exactly the same. Up until now, I would copy/paste the replies into a text editor for easy access! Pretty low tech, I know… this changes everything
Blah blah blah. The canned response feature is nuthing but recycled code from Gugls HR department: It replies “Thank you for your application. Unfortunately, we can’t consider you for this job” to every e-mail sent to jobs@google.com that doesn’t contain at least “PhD” or “Dr.” and (”Harvard” or “Stanford”). Fukkin idiots.