Last week Google announced a new set of gadgets for Gmail Labs that offer integration with Docs and Google Calendar. But perhaps most exciting (and under-emphasized at the time) was the introduction of support for third party gadgets, giving users the chance to add features to Gmail beyond what Google offers.

One of the first developers to take advantage of the new feature is Remember The Milk (RTM), a popular To-Do list application that we reviewed back in 2005. The service allows users to access and input to-do items from a variety of locations, and offers its core service for free (you can pay $25 a year for support on extra mobile devices). While RTM offered support for Gmail before now, it was reliant on a Firefox extension, raising the barrier to entry and cutting out a large portion of the browser market.

While most web mail services have remained largely unchanged over the last ten years or so, Google has been updating GMail on a near constant basis, whether it’s updating the core of the product or releasing new upgrades via the Labs.

Earlier this evening, they announced a new feature I can see myself using quite frequently called “canned responses.”  

Just like it sounds, it’s the ability to offer pre-written responses for commonly written emails:

If you’re sick of typing out the same reply every time someone emails you with a common question, now you can compose your reply once and save the message text with the “Canned responses” button. Later, you can open that same message and send it again and again.

It couldn’t get any easier unless Gmail automatically pushed the Send button.

I’ve always preferred that people refer to me with the much more politically correct term “convenience enthusiast,” and given that I’m such a convenience enthusiast, I’m pretty glad that they’ve also included the ability to hook these autoresponses in to filters.

Several years ago, when I made the migration from Microsoft Outlook to GMail (due to the fact that my decade-long email archive was taking up a measureable percentage of my hard-drive space), the feature I missed the most was the ability to do custom responses based on what sort of emails I was recieving.

As I pointed out the other day, working for Mashable has swollen the amount of email I get on a daily basis to an almost unmanagable level, so this feature could go a long way towards simplifying this aspect of my life.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:GMail Phasing In IMAPGmail Mobile Gets an UpdateBe Careful if You Access Gmail Through a Public HotspotNew GMail Features Show Up In Some AccountsGmail Storage Is Now 6 GigabytesGmail Mobile Version 1.5 Not Lookin’ So GoodGMail Adding Greasemonkey Support?

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