[Design] filters: request "suggest template" filter action

[Kaitlin Duck Sherwood]

I would like to request a filter action that adds a canned response 
to an easily-accessible menu of suggested responses.  Auto-answer is 
also nice -- particularly for vacation messages -- but having a human 
sanity-checker in the loop is much safer.

In 1994, I got all the mail to webmaster at uiuc dot edu.  Because 
this was one of the only email addresses publicly available and 
because very few campus units had information on the Web, that 
account got a *lot* of mail.

I was lucky enough to have the use of @ATS, a Web-based interface to email.:
	http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/News/Access/Stories/97Stories/ATATS.html
I was able to get through webmaster email about ten times faster than 
with Eudora.

When @ATS displayed a message, it would also display a list of 
suggested responses with checkboxes next to them.  Below the 
checkboxes were two buttons: _Send_ and _Edit_.  _Edit_ would take 
you to a page where you could tweak the canned responses before 
sending.

You would specify when to suggest responses via filters, e.g.
	if "admission" appears in body
	then suggest "Undergraduate Admissions" response

	if "admission" appears in body
	then suggest "Graduate Admissions" response

	if "e" appears in body		(which was my way of faking "default")
	then suggest "random question" response

So, for example, if I got a message with "admission" in the body, 
there would be three checkboxes at the bottom.
	[] _Undergraduate Admissions_    (<-hyperlink)
	[] _Graduate Admissions_
	[] _Random Question_

If it was clearly about undergraduate admissions, I'd check the top 
box.  If it was clearly about grad admissions, I'd hit the middle 
box.  If I couldn't tell if it was grad or undergrad, I'd check both 
boxes.  If it was just some random strange question, I'd check the 
_Random Question_ box.  (That one said something along the lines of 
"I'm sorry, that's a little out of my subject area" and gave a bunch 
of different campus URLs.)

If I couldn't remember what the text of a response was, I could click 
on the name of the response, e.g. _Undergraduate Admissions_, and it 
would take me to a page with the text of the message -- and give me 
the opportunity to edit the page.

Because this was all done over the Web, the database of canned 
responses was available to multiple people.  The Mosaic support team 
told me that this was very valuable for sharing knowledge and for 
training purposes.

@ATS took care of all the record-locking for replying to email 
messages and for editing the canned responses.

If Chandler can figure out which responses to suggest, that would be great.

It seems to me that given Chandler's other capabilities, this one 
should be relatively simple to implement.   And, given the amazing 
productivity increase for customer-support teams, I think this is an 
important feature to implement.

-- 
Kaitlin Duck Sherwood
Author of the _Overcome Email Overload_ series, http://www.EmailOverload.com