Just Have Your Gmail Contact My Gmail

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.