MacMost Now 456: Autoresponders With Apple Mail

You can use Rules in Mail to create autoresponders that will instantly reply with an automatic message when you get email. You can tailor the autoresponders to reply to messages with certain subjects, from people or domains or to special email addresses.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. In today's episode let's create autoresponders in mail. So there are lot of cool things you can could do with rules in mail, one of them is to create autoresponders to instantly respond to incoming messages based on certain criteria. Let's take a look. So here we are, inside of mail. Now suppose you get messages like this first one here, where the subject all is the same, in this case is as business inquiry. This could be created by a web form or a link to email you on a webpage or maybe something you may want to work on the subjects are always the same, have some similarity when you get certain type of message. Well, we can set up a rule by coming to mail preferences, going to rules here and clicking add rule and in there we could create something like autorespond for the name and set it to subject contains and instantly put in business inquiry because I have got this one selected and now we can select reply to message as the action to perform, then click on the message text to reply. Click okay and now this rule will appear in our rules. You don't want to apply to the messages, you seen here, we can always edit it if we ever want to and every time we get a message like this one put instantly we reply sent, that will put that message there above the coded text in the email. Now this one can read the message out of the inbox. You can do that by adding something to the rule here, where it moves the message to another folder and you may just want to leave it in your inbox if it just say, I will get back to you soon kind of message but if it's something out of - where we just want to respond say with a price list or with further instructions, then you might want to just clear out of your inbox right away. Now you could also change which emails trigger this rule instead of using a subject line for instance you could have it set to emails that you had from certain people or from certain domains or you could have it even to certain email addresses. Now the reason to be wanting to use this is say you get email to your personal email address, you also get other email addresses like maybe support at your company name or inquiry at your company name and the form itself is set to sent it to one of these addresses, so you know friends you and your email to support at, that it's a question about your website and we want to autorespond with a quick argue back since they can or maybe email them with a list of frequently asked questions and list in the support page. You could even have an autorespond based on message content. So, if you can have certain keywords in the content you can have an autorespond sent maybe getting what the questions are asking you and respond automatically. There are lot of different things you could do. Now, this only works if your computer is on and mail is running and receiving email on a regular basis. If mail is not running or your computer is in sleep, it's not going to get email and it's not going to respond to these. Still this could be pretty useful for some people and relatively easy to set up. So, next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.

MacMost Now 456: Autoresponders With Apple Mail

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