You are probably familiar with and have used an Out Of Office email autoresponse.  But wouldn't it save you time if you could set-up an automatic email response to a customers' request for other item's like a Catalog, Data Sheet, New Product Announcement, or Corporate Presentation.  This could be viewed as a simple Sales Force Automation (SFA) application.

This can be done in Outlook by following three general steps: 1. creating a Rule (Filter in Eudora), 2. create and save an email template (myautoresponder.oft) that will be your autoresponse, and 3. set your email application to automatically check your email at some regular interval.  The Rules Wizard is very helpful in walking you through most of the necessary steps.  Now, when Outlook checks your email, the filter will act on the incoming emails, and execute the steps defined by the Rule you have defined.  (If you have an email account on a Microsoft Exchange Server, the server can apply rules to your messages even if you don't have Outlook running. Check with your IT Department to implement these server-based rules.)

Rules fall into two general categories: notification and organization. Notification rules alert you in some way when you receive a particular message. For example, you can create a rule that automatically sends an email message to your mobile telephone when you receive a message from a family member (see my 03 AUG 05 TechTIP for more about this).  Organization rules perform one or more actions on a message. For example, you can create a rule that places messages from your manager in a folder for urgent review, or perform the autoresponse I mentioned at the beginning, and automatically reply to a customer inquiry with a boilerplate text message, and/or return an attached file, i.e. corporate presentation, catalog, data sheet, etc. 

In Outlook the Rules can be found under the Tools menu.  Now you know what can be done, and where to begin to create your own rules.  Implementing a little SFA can improve customer response time (and customer satisfaction), and save you time for more important issues.