Gmail’s “Response Templates” Feature Is Finally Working
The Gmail Templates feature has just undergone a badly needed overhaul. Badly named “boilerplate replies”, this is not a feature where Gmail offers a two-word response to an email. (This is a “smart answer.”) This is a much more useful feature, hidden in the Advanced menu of the Gmail desktop interface preferences, that allows you to save multiple emails for reuse whenever you compose an email.
This is a very useful feature, a kind of special clipboard for your email. You can use it to store your professional bio, a form disclaimer, or a template for anything you’ve emailed multiple times. From any compose window, you can insert one of your templates or save the current message as a template.
This feature appeared in the Gmail lab 10 years ago and has looked pretty much the same since then. Once you enable this feature, it will be available in any window in which you write an email (including replies). Click the three-dot menu in the lower-right corner of the compose window, next to the trash can, and at the top of the pop-up menu, you will see Reply Templates.
Until recently, when you opened the reply templates menu, you saw a list of your currently saved emails, but you saw it three times. One list is for inserting the saved template, one is for overwriting the saved template with your current draft, and the third is for deleting the template. It got cluttered and I often got very close to deleting my email templates. (At least Gmail gave a warning before being deleted or overwritten.)
But now! Gmail has hidden the “save” and “delete” options behind its own submenus, recognizing that you don’t need these options nearly as often as you need the “paste” option. It’s a much smarter design and makes email templates that much more useful. Especially if you follow Lifehacker’s tips for writing perfect email .