Email Templates and Saved Replies

Invoices, quotations, confirmations, contracts, complaints and the paper trail behind them all still travel by email, and it remains the one business channel not owned by a platform that can change its terms. It is also the key to nearly every other account a business holds, which is a good reason to treat the mailbox as infrastructure rather than an inbox.

What has not changed is that a large share of it is the same handful of messages, written again and again.

Why the draft trick no longer holds up

The traditional answer was to write the message once, keep it in the drafts folder, and open it when the same question came round again. It works, but it has a flaw that catches everyone eventually: sending a draft consumes it. Unless it is duplicated first, the reusable message disappears the moment it is used.

Drafts also store their recipients. A draft reopened in a hurry can carry yesterday's addresses into today's message, which is a small mistake with disproportionate consequences.

Templates

Every major email service now has a proper feature for this, and it solves both problems: the saved message stays saved, and it holds no addresses.

In Gmail the feature is called Templates, and it was previously known as Canned Responses. It is switched off by default and lives in Settings, under See all settings and then the Advanced tab. Once enabled, any composed message can be stored from the three-dot menu at the bottom of the compose window, and inserted into a new message in two clicks. It is a desktop feature; the mobile app cannot create or enable templates.

Outlook handles it differently depending on the version. New Outlook and Outlook on the web use the My Templates add-in in the compose ribbon. Classic Outlook saves a message as a template file through File and Save As, and Quick Parts stores shorter reusable blocks of text for dropping into a message mid-sentence.

On a phone, the closest equivalent is the keyboard's own text replacement: a short trigger that expands into a longer phrase, set up under Keyboard settings on iOS or in the personal dictionary on Android. It handles a one-line reply rather than a formatted message, but it covers the most frequent case.

Sending the same message to a group

The old advice was to put everyone in the BCC field. For three or four people that is still fine. For anything resembling a list it is not.

Bulk messages sent this way are frequently treated as spam, arrive without any way to unsubscribe, and depend entirely on nobody ever putting the addresses in CC by mistake — a slip that exposes every recipient's address to every other recipient, and one that data protection regulators in the UK and EU have treated as a reportable breach. Marketing consent rules apply to these messages regardless of how they are sent.

For a genuine list, a mail merge tool or a mailing service does the job properly: one personalised message per recipient, an unsubscribe link, and no shared address field to get wrong.

What drafts are still good for

Composing something long before the facts are settled. Writing the reply that should not be sent immediately, and reading it again in the morning. And where the concern is timing rather than content, most services now offer scheduled send, which is a cleaner answer than leaving a finished message sitting in a folder waiting to be remembered.

Keeping it from sounding canned

A template earns its keep on the answers that must be exactly right every time — pricing, refund terms, standard conditions. It is worth writing placeholders in square brackets where a name or a date belongs, so that an unedited message is obvious at a glance before it goes.

Anything that depends on what the sender actually said should still be written. The point of saving the repetitive replies is having the time to write the ones that matter.