How do I send a prewritten email automatically to particular email senders via Gmail? Autoresponders won't do.

Question

I want to send pre-written emails to a particular set of email senders, WHOSE EMAILS ADDRESSES I DON'T HAVE UNTIL THEY EMAIL ME.

Autoresponders only send prewritten emails to a mailing list or people whose email addresses you already have.

I use Gmail and it does have such a feature but only for Vacation. The filter option will only forward the email to another email address. Is there any plugin or free program which can use Gmail to send a prewritten email to anyone (meeting set email criteria) who emails me to my Gmail account?

Answer 1

My guess is you're looking to send messages from your gmail account for your business--something like Ebay or another online system in which preset conditions are met and a confirmation email is sent while you're at work and can't fufill the order.

While there's a lot of free software that can do this, there are a couple of tools and routes for this.

1st off the easiest is to use Outlook from Office 2003.
Write a rule that modifies the text and sends as a reply, the preset you have. Then the final portion of the rule puts the email in your outbox, which you set to send and receive every 5 minutes. The interaction of Outlook with Gmail is a simple pop3 interface, and the rules engine while a bit roundabaout can get the job done.

2nd Option: You can write this in Perl, VBS, or even a BAT script to check the box(again setup the pop3 settings in Gmail and connect as part of the mail interface of your operating system) as part of either a cron tab or a schedule. There are dozens of mail scripts available online to modify to your needs and parameters. That said, the onus will be on you to write error handling so your account doesn't spam your recipients.

There are dozens of other options but each will require a slightly technical approach.

Good luck