Wednesday, October 8, 2008

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We’ve all done it. Circa 2 a.m. Saturday night, you stumble in from the bar, plop down in front of your laptop and proceed to compose a gmail response to your boss (one less thing to do hungover) or profess your love to your ex-flame. I’m an on the go-offender myself. Damn blackberry email capabilities.

Well this week Google announced a side-kick to assist in combating drunk habits, “mail goggles”. The term is a play on “beer goggles”, the sad but true presumption that after a few glasses of wine, the scrawny guy in the corner with the sweater vest increasingly resembles John Mayer.

At the bar, we have our girlfriends to assure us of the true nature of our prey (I do believe my best friends saved me on my 21st from going for a 40+ married man). At our computers, we now have Mail Goggles on our side.

Google’s plan is to make sure that you really want to send that email by automatically prompting you to answer five simple math problems before you hit the ‘send’ button. Apparently if you can do a little addition and subtraction, you should be aware of the consequences of your emailing. I've never been a math quiz and I'm not sure how accurately this is all going to resonate with a tipsy Blogette, but I'm definitely seeing success for a similar Facebook app.

According to the Official Gmail Blog, Mail Goggles is by default only active late night on the weekend, as that is the time you're most likely to need it. Once enabled, you can adjust when it's active in the General settings.

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