Thursday, October 23, 2008

Drunk-Proofing Your Email

Google has already solved so many of the world’s problems; it was only a matter of time before they tackled this one: Drunk Emailing. I won’t tell any personal stories here, but I am sure you can imagine the scenario. It’s Friday night, you’ve had a few drinks, you are thinking things over, maybe remembering the good old times with your ex or reliving that argument you had with your boss and suddenly it comes to you—the perfect comeback. You hop online and type away. Before you have time to think twice about what you are doing, you’ve already hit the send button and that email is off to surf the internets and make small carnage out of your personal or professional life.

The solution: Mail Goggles. Mail Goggles is a Gmail application that will make you think twice before hitting the send button. Here’s how it works:
First of all, by default Mail Goggles is activated at night and on weekends, the times when you are most likely to be in the predicament described above (you can change these settings if they don’t match your particular habits). When you sign into your email account during the ‘active’ hours, you will be forced to answer a series of mathematical questions before being allowed to send any mail. You can customize this feature to reflect your actual (sober) mathematical ability.



If you take too long to answer the questions or if you get too many of the questions wrong, the message will be saved in your Drafts folder for you to review and possibly send tomorrow. Then the program tells you to go to bed. Brilliant, right? More info here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What a great idea! I also heard that they might come out with a version for bookish types where you have to answer literary questions such as "name all the sisters in Little Women." LOL
love, mom