March 11, 2009

Use Gmail to tell the world about yourself

Here's a trick that you might find handy.

Using a combination of gmail address aliases and canned responses, you can use gmail to automatically send directed, and relevant responses on your behalf.

You have to enable canned responses ...
... add a canned response while composing ...

and set up an appropriate filter.

As you can see in the pictures above, I have set up gmail to respond to any mails to sandesh247+ci@gmail.com with my contact information. I could have a public web page that does the same thing, yes, but in this way I reveal information only to those who explicitly ask for it, plus I have an account of all the requests.

You have to be careful though, this does set your account up for spamming. An automated reply immediately validates an email id, make sure you do this only with email addresses you want to make public.