Those little teams of developers at the Googleplex working on anything they please have come up with another spiffing wheeze: autoresponders in Gmail.

If, like me, you can never be bothered setting up the autoresponders at your Web host, this is a good alternative. Simple and (we hope) effective. Like everything else Googlish, it’s free.

To find out how to get started, go to How do I set up an automatic vacation response?

Typically, they don’t even call them autoresponders, which would put a lot of people off.