When running an online business and you want to be known as a reliable and responsive company you are going to answer a lot of emails.

Many of those emails will contain the same – or mostly the same – information, like,

“Thank you so much for your interest, but currently we don’t offer a whole sale program. Let me add you to our mailing list so that we can inform you when that changes.”

I learned very early that I definitely don’t want to type this over and over and have looked for solution to reduce my typing.

I found many. One that offers the most features is AutoHotKey. It could do all I needed but is very hard to set up. You have to edit a text file defining macros – it’s nearly a programmers job. Not that I mind as I am, by trade, of that breed, but I found something much easier to use for my limited objective: a plugin for Thunderbird. It was perfect as I was using this email client anyways. But then the support for this plugin got slower and slower and was always a few versions of Thunderbird behind, so I had to postpone upgrading it until the plugin update had come out.

And now with the idea to go to possibly using a different email client – I would lose all my functionality that I got so used to.

So I searched again and found AutoText by Jitbit AutoText, and that seems to not only offer me to replace the functions in Thunderbird, but in any other application I use as well. Once I have a definition for something like ‘chm’ defined to be expanded to “Cheers, Merlin” I can use that abbreviation also in Gmail and any other web-based program.

I searched hard and long for this – so hope it helps you out.