by Josh
Running a large number of sites I frequently get quite a bit of email that all have similar answers. Things like “Do you offer international shipping?” or “How can I submit an article?”…those sorts of things. All of these sorts of questions I have to spend time answering…time that could be spent much better doing other things.
Enter MailTemplate. Mactank’s MailTemplate lets you create predefined replies and new email messages that help you streamline common messages.
It’s only available for Mail and Entourage on Mac OS X and is worth every penny of the $14.95. Give it a try.
For Windows users running Outlook, email templates is a good one. It saves me lots of time sending form-letter replies, and you can even use scripting to customize the replies.
I’ve been using a program called TypeItIn (www.wavget.com) for this for about 6 years now. It’s paid for itself many times over and I’ve even gotten several other customer service departments using it now.
I also quite like MailTemplate, but have you tried Peter Maurer’s TEXTPANDER? (his site is here: http://petermaurer.de/nasi.php )
It lets you create “shortcuts / snippets” for text you regularly have to type; to give you an example:
whenever I type “sksig” (which stands for – my company – silverknuckle signature), in any application the following will magically appear:
Yours,
Patrice
SilverKnuckle.com
(Plus my whole address)
TEXTPANDER would of course also work perfectly for FAQ-style/regularly-needed emails/templates. I love it! And it is Donationware.
Dumb question – how is this different from Entourage 2004’s Scrapbook feature?
Jim, I honestly have no clue. I dropped Entourage years ago in favor of Apple’s Mail app.
Mozilla Thunderbird users might want to look at “Quicktext” -extension, which is great for text snippets that get repeated often. (and especially when you still want to customize some parts of the message)
Not a dumb question, Jim, the answer is that Entourage can’t be had for less than, say, $300 with the rest of Mac Office. Textpander is free. (donations encouraged of course)
I also use two other programs by the same developer, both are also donationware: Butler and Witch. I have been using Butler for a long time, since it was called Another Launcher, and donated back then. I may again soon, considering how much I use Textpander.
I’d also have to throw out a shameless plug out for Mailroom, which does the same kind of thing as a hosted email app.
Mailroom
We’re rolling out some great new features in version 2.0 in about a month or so, along with a CRMish app to accompany Mailroom.