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Sending auto replies in Gmail

I happened to find a thread in the Gmail forum that read, "When I get an email, can that person get an auto reply stating my new email address?". 

The easy answer to that is, "Of course!". All it requires are creating a canned response - called Templates in Gmail these days, and a filter. 

In this blog, we shall look at the details of those.

The first step is to create the Template (the canned response). The details related to Templates are already mentioned in https://blogs-on-gmail.blogspot.com/2019/05/canned-responses.html, So here, I shall simply go through the process of creating a Template that suits our purpose.

We write the response and then follow the process to save it as a Template.


Once our response is written, we can focus on creating the filter. To begin, we click on this Show search options icon.


We have just one criterion for this filter, to match all emails where our email address is entered as a recipient. 

Note: Historically it was specified that "to:" included "cc:" and "bcc:" and it continues to remain so. So, this filter will match all incoming emails where the address is mentioned as a to/cc/bcc recipient.


In the next screen, we check the box for "Send template" and click on the "Choose template" dropdown box to select the one we just created - Gmail Auto Reply New Address.


To finish creating the filter, we click on the blue Create filter button.

We can now visit the Filters and blocked addresses tab under Gmail settings to check on the filter definition.


We are now done. To test, we need to send an email from any other email address and check whether we receive our newly created Template in response or not. 

For testing, we sign into a second account and draft a message with the recipient address in any of the recipients' sections. 

We send out the message and within a minute we receive the auto-reply from the other account.


If you have any questions on this topic, please post them in the comments below. For any unrelated Gmail queries, please post them in the specialised Gmail help forum by clicking on this link - https:/support.google.com/mail/thread/new.

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