'Beer Goggles'- the phrase every man knows and fears. Well how about Mail Goggles? Doesn't sound familiar? It might do soon.Google has launched a new feature aimed at tackling drunken e-mailing. Developed by Jon Perlow, a Google engineer, 'Mail Goggles' is built into Google's Gmail service. The name is a play the popular phrase 'beer goggles' - and we all know how deceptive that state can be and the new feature forces e-mailers to answer five basic math questions in 60 seconds correctly, before the e-mail can be sent.
The feature's default is set for late at night on the weekend, although the user can change this to whenever they feel they may be most at risk. It's easy to change the Google features on you Gmail page and ensure that the settings are active when you are likely to be at your most descriptive, emotionally. The difficulty can also be personalized for any maths geniuses out there. If the user is unlucky enough to fail to complete the questions or answer them incorrectly, they are quickly told to go to bed with a glass of water.
Most people will have experienced the preils of drunken emailing before, be it on the sending or the receiving end. The best time to declare your undying love for a colleague or the ex of a best friend, often seems to be after a few too many on a Friday night. And inevitably, the next morning you will regret even thinking of sending such a long, rambling and potentially incredibly humiliating email.
Google hopes that this feature will stop unnecessary embarrassment at the first hurdle, if you have been unlucky enough to type 'I love you, please take me back' correctly of course.
Perlow wrote: "It will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email."
Perlow developed the feature using his Google Labs time. All engineers at the company are encouraged to spend a day a week working on personal projects, some of which are developed into full products or services.
However, Mail Goggles is not available from Blackberry's or iPhone's so don't rest easy yet. And this is not the first tackle against regrettable drunken conversations. The last few years have Virgin Mobile allow customers in Australia to block outgoing calls to certain numbers late at night and in Korea LG introduced a mobile phone with a built-in Breathalyzer.
But Mail Goggles could find itself a welcome addition to the list. Now, if somebody could make similar drunk-filters for Facebook, MySpace and Twitter and give our mobile phones to a friend with strict orders to ensure we do not touch them until the morning, then we could finally enjoy alcohol without worries of the embarrassment to come.
