Thanks for all of the replies - I hope someone makes some xtra christmas $$ with this one. That's true - it's not quite honest - however if you were really selling a guitar, then only one person out of the hundreds emailing you would get what they want. So technically you're only being dishonest with one of them, the rest would have been receiving the "I don't have this item anymore" email anyway - you may as well provide them with some satisfaction. Plus if you wanted to be less dishonest - you could always sign up with ebay's affiliate program - then you could provide a landing page with a link to the guitar on ebay, plus some lessons from Clickbank.
lol, well some people are looking for free guitar lessons, on craigslist their excpecting to pay money
I used to market stuff with CL and auto responders but its hard now as theres no anon posting and accounts are more difficult to create, you will get banned sooner or later (sooner if on any scale to make any decent money). It is a good idea though, my angle was slightly different but same techniques. Just beware, CL is full of spam nazis.
guys, you can't use the gmail autoresponder for this - it will be treated as spam. Replying manually will work tho
What you have to do is choose the option that prevents anyone from emailing you through the anonymous craigslist system - and then post your email address in the listing.
copy and paste the "visual" part of html. For instance create your webpage, could be just a link, highlight the content (links,pictures) and paste it into the email. Manually writing html into a gmail email doesn't work, as you can see.
i was doing a similar think using gumtree. it works quite well. if you post around 20 ads a day on lots of different classified sites then you can rake it in. just takes a bit to do! ive had no problems with the gmail vacation thingo