Google Steps In to Stop Drunk eMailers
At first I thought it was one of those clever Google April Fools jokes. But then again its October and times are not funny - unless you’re the guy jumping off with a golden parachute - but I digress. But this whole thing called “Mail Goggles” is real and could prove to be very useful to those who send emails late at night after a few drinks. The target market is obvious: young men under the influence writing to the beautiful girl in class.. yada yada you get the picture. But I’m sure it could be effectively used by a frustrated employee, a lonely woman etc.
Basically, the way it works is, you set the times when this feature should be active. The default times of course are late Friday and Saturday nights - but that could be changed according to your personal lifestyle. You can even set the difficulty level if you wish! Then during those times when you send an eMail you’ll be forced to do some math on your screen to confirm that you really do wish to send that eMail. You have 60 seconds to complete the assignment and once you’ve passed, your email goes through. I noticed though that the second eMail doesn’t get that question - it just lets it through. I’m thinking maybe they should have the test for the first few eMails, but then again you may have walked away before you finish your first one. Here is a sample screen shot:
To activate this feature, go to your Gmail Settings and click on the “Labs” tab. Then scroll down until you see “Mail Goggles”.
See, Google is looking out for you! It only takes one email to ruin a relationship so stay safe out there!
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Comments
Shailesh:
What’s that Don Henley line … “We’re just prisoners of our own device.” Seems that Google developed an algorithm that recognizes when people should be given time to think about their intentions. Fun post.
This reminds me of when I lived in Australia, Vodafone offered a feature to prevent drunk dialing. It required calling an activation number like here for checking your mins i.e. *MIN except it was something like *DD and that would activate a feature on your phone that PREVENTED you from making any outgoing numbers to your drunk dial blocked call list. If my memory serves me, you had to add specific people to your drunk dial list. Anyway, there were adds for the service on buses and what not. Pretty funny stuff. Not sure how popular it was though… I never used it:)
@Thesa - yep so can I
@Craig - I’m glad you enjoyed it
@jenny - We’ll see how much this one gets used.. 
I can think of a couple people who should use this for email and late night blogging…