Now it’s time to take action, using Gmail’s powerful feature.

One thing one can do, is using Gmail filters to identify chain mails according to the mail’s subject (Which will be typically “Fw:Fw something” or similar), and archive/delete/label this message. But, this is not aggressive enough. Here is another action one can take using another powerful Gmail feature (currently a “Labs” feature).

What we’re going to do is: To identify a chain mail according to its subject, and then to reply to the sender with a (sort of) aggressive mail.

First of all, go to Settings -> Labs and look for the “Canned Responses” feature, and enable it.

Canned Responses

No, when we have this feature enabled, we can go and create a new can response:

Click compose (as if you’re going to send an Email), and leave the “TO”,”Subject” and other fields empty, we only need to fill the body:

In the body, write a short message telling the forwarder how much you like him.

In the same row where the “attach file” appears, you should be able to see a new option “Canned Responses”: Click it, and choose “save  new canned response”. You’ll be asked to give a name to this response, you can call it “Fw autoreply”.

Save a Canned Response

The last step is to bind this reponse with a filter, to do this, go to Settings -> Filters and click “Create a new filter”.

In the subject field, type this:

“Fw: Fw:” OR “Fw:Fw” OR “Fw:Fwd” OR “Fw: Fwd” OR “Fwd: Fw” OR “Fwd:Fw”

Create a Filter

Click next, and then select the checkbox “Send canned response:” and chose the canned response we just created from the drop down list.

Bind filter with canned response

Click “Create Filter”.

That’s it, now you are sure that everybody forwarding an Email to you and not bothering to clean the title (so you can guess that the body of the message is much more polluted) will know what you think about him.

Enjoy.

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Using Gmail to Fight Chain Mails

Anyway, recently I discovered a very cool (and useful) service in GMail: A Task Manager built-in GMail, with a minimal and simple UI (this is one other thing that I like in Google).

To enable it, in your GMail accout go to settings, choose the Labs tab, look for a feature called “Tasks” and select “enable”.

Now, In your GMail sidebar (that is where your inbox, sent messages, etc. are located) and you’ll find a new link just below “Contacts”, surprisingly it’s called “Tasks”. Click it and see the magic.

I already use todo.txt for task management, which is a great tool (see my previous post about todo.txt), but its problem is that it’s local, and to access it from multiple places you’ll need to put in some effort (saving the list in a server, linking to the remote file from the local machines etc.). What’s beautiful about GMail’s task manager is that you can access it from everywhere just like you access your GMail account or Google-Docs account.

That’s it. Go try it and become more productive

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Did You Notice the New Task Manager in Gmail?