Mail Goggles: A breathalyzer test for your Gmail

By Jacqui Cheng | Published: October 07, 2008 - 10:33AM CT

How many times have you stumbled home after a long night out with friends, only to plop down in front of the computer and start sending e-mails that you would wake up regretting the next day? OK, maybe some of our older readers in the crowd have never moved beyond "drunk dialing," but many of us are probably more familiar with the embarrassing phenomenon, a technological evolution of the drunk dial. Thanks to a new project out of Google Labs, however, you can at least stop yourself from sending "impaired" e-mails during certain hours.

Called "Mail Goggles," the Gmail add-on makes sending e-mail from Gmail more difficult during certain times that you can set manually (while sober, that is). How does it do this? If you have Mail Goggles installed—which you can do by going to the "Labs" tab under your Gmail settings and turning them on—it will force you to answer a series of math questions before sending out any new messages.

Not only can you adjust the days and hours yourself under your General Gmail settings, you can also adjust the math difficulty.

If you get any of the questions wrong, Mail Goggles will say, "Water and bed for you. Or try again." Of course, if you set the math settings too high, you may have a tough time solving some of those problems in under 60 seconds, even when sober (the ones pictured above are from a math level of 3). Then again, if you're sober, you could just turn Mail Goggles off and hit send on that impassioned letter to your ex-boyfriend/girlfriend or that flame to your boss.

Now, if only I could get something like this for text messaging on my iPhone on Friday and Saturday nights.