Gmail can be a very effective and productive way to keep in touch with your referrals while saving time.  Some of this is probably doable with other web based email accounts but I like Gmail's easy usage.  If you don't have a gmail account then consider creating one.  If you are using FireFox, Mike recommended adding this pluginto easily access and manage multiple gmail accounts.

There are two ways in Gmail to greet and respond to new ACME People Search referral email notice without having you checking your email all the time.  The canned response was previously discussed here.  Another way is to create a dedicated gmail account for new ACME referrals but set up a vacation response. 

In gmail, you can easily setup a vacation response by going to the upper right corner after logging into your inbox, click on setting  and scroll down to vacation responder under Generals tap.  Here you can craft a message just to great your referrals.  Any time you get a referral notice, the vacation responder would send a reply to your new referral.  If you don't want to create a new gmail account, setting up the canned response is probably better.  However, I like the vacation responder better because it would send out a response whenever you get an email.   In this email, you can do both by greeting a new referral by welcoming them to the ACME family as well as having a portion talking about ACME and sending them to a presell page or blog. 

This is a very powerful feature if you have signed up for traffic exchanges or websites where a lot of people send you advertisements with their email address in the From field.  When a vacation responder message is sent out immediately, you're not spamming anyone but more like a courtesy that you can't get to their message right away while adding a few lines about the ACME business opportunity.  I'm not sure if gmail would send out duplicate replies to new referrals if you have the canned response and vacation responder set up in the same account so just setup one or another.

Two other gmail features that I find very useful are your Signature and label function.  The signature box is in the same page as where you set your vacation response.  When the signatue is enabled, it will attach a signature to any outgoing email.  This could be a great way to send people to your facebook or twitter profile pages or even your blog too whenever you send out a message. 

I find the gmail label function useful when I'm trying to organize my emails both for ingoing and outgoing messages.  The label function is a button at the top of the gmail inbox.  You can select a group of messages and give them a label which would show up at the left hand side of your inbox.  I find this useful when I'm following up with my referrals on step1, step2 and step3 without requiring them to opt-in again with the GVO Eresponder right away.   Since I have already wrote messages to previous referrals, I could just label them as acme follow up and reuse those messages but making minor changes tailored to each referral's situation or step completion.  This saves me a lot of time so I don't have to rewrite the same messages to a new referral each time.  The transition from gmail to GVO Eresponder will be done in due time

Hopefully you find this helpful.

Milton