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Gmail’s Mail Goggles Saves You from Email Morning After
By Dave Peterson | October 8, 2008
Way back, when dinosaurs roamed the Interwebs, I was on the Prodigy online service. Users got 30 free emails a month (who would ever need more?). With about one a day, you didn’t want to be spending them lightly. When you went to send your mail, a box would pop up, saying something like “Are you sure you want to send this mail?” They were probably just trying to save us from accidentally sending something off unintentionally, but the question always gave the impression that the system had read your mail, raised a digital eyebrow, and was asking you to seriously reconsider your words.
This week, Gmail rolled out a new experimental option called Mail Goggles (look for it in the Lab section). The theory is that sometimes people send email that they later regret. Further, that this mail may be sent at predictable times (like late at night on Fridays or Saturdays) and that the sender might be in a somewhat impaired condition.
Mail Goggles can be configured to swing into action on any day and beginning with any hour at which you think you’ll start making bad mailing decisions. During those danger hours, a click of the send button will bring up an impromptu math quiz: Five simple problems with a sixty second limit for completion. Try to click Send without solving the problems and you’ll be told, “Water and bed for you. Or try again.” But it won’t let you send unless you can solve the problems. The difficulty can be set with five degrees of severity, but even the level five problems are not that tough. Just to be safe though, you might want to make sure you can solve them sober, first.
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