How do I auto-reply to text messages received through Google Voice?

Question

I recently got a new phone number, and I want people who contact me at my old number to be automatically informed of my new number. I've ported my old phone number to Google Voice and set up a prerecorded voicemail greeting that says "this isn't my number anymore, here is my new number...."

Now I would like to do the same thing for texts received at the old number. In other words, when people text me at the Google Voice number, I want them to receive an automated text reply that says "this isn't my number anymore, here is my new number...."

I tried following the instructions from this ZDNet article to set up a Gmail label filter that sends a canned response to all text messages coming from Google Voice.

Unfortunately, this didn't work because Gmail's auto-respond feature will NOT reply to the address in the From field, it instead responds to the Return-Path header. Thus the auto-reply was sent to the bounce catcher grandcentral.bounces.google.com, which is the mailed-by address instead of the necessary txt.voice.google.com address.

I have it set up to work with IFTTT which sends an auto-reply from IFTTT but I would love to use Google to do everything. Is that at all possible?

Is there a script that will auto-reply to the txt.voice.google.com?

Answer 1

So what we're going to do is configure Google Voice to send an email to Gmail when it gets a text. When Gmail gets that email, based on matching filter selection rules, it will automatically reply with a canned response. Because Google Voice passes along the texting details in the address of the email, when Gmail's filter does its automatic reply, that reply will actually be texted to the the sender.