Email Auto Responders

We are currently looking into signing up with Salesforce.com. We would like to work with you guys though if we can get everything that we need here.

The most major thing that we are requesting as of now is the ability to communicate with our customers through our product creation process.

1 - We would need to be able to change the status names for the fields list (which we cannot do)

2 - And have the ability to send an automatic email when it hits each of those statuses.

3 - these emails need to be sent from some type of a letter template, that is directed toward that status.

Let us know if we have the ability to do that here, and we are just overlooking it.

Thanks for your help.