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> Any ideas on how to dial down the douche factor while maintaining the benefits?

Using something that replaces the letter with the matching text snippet?

I was considering this out the outset, but one of the benefits of sending responses this way is that other people I work with have started to use it (which they wouldn't if it appeared as a snippet).

Do both.

I used to embed tags in emails, e.g., will-reply:2d and silly stuff like that for two reasons:

1) Keyboard macros could expand it into human-readable text (but leave the tag) and

2) The email client I used at the time made it easy to hang functionality off of email content so I could automate stuff like issue and time tracking etc. based on email tags.

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