TechJournal

Google has always had an eye for simple solutions to worldly problems.  Too much information - search, expensive office software - ad supported office suite, drunken email - goggles.

Yes,  you read it right, drunken emails, these are the emails users usually send that are made while their minds aren't thinking straight.  Examples might be long ranting emails to the boss or a pitiful rambling to an ex-lover or any email that's sent which the user wished he hadn't.   Google's solution is an easy one yet probably highly effective or completely annoying.

Mail Goggles is designed to deter users from sending email that they might soon regret.  The tool works as a last ditch confirmation to send the email.  It asks five arithmetic questions easy enough to answer in a given time limit.  If answered correctly, the system assumes that the users are in the right state of mind to actually send he email.

To activate the entire Mail Goggles tool, the user must enable the option in the Gmail settings. By default, the question difficulty is set to the easiest and the time limit is sixty seconds.  Moreover, also by default, Mail Goggles only activated during Friday and Saturday from 10PM to 4AM.  However all these setting are adjustable.

The whole tool might appear to be weird and childish but in reality it's another simple solution to a simple problem.  More interestingly, activating Mail Goggles in the Labs settings opened my eyes to an array of tools that may be useful to every day emailing.  There's one feature that I'll suggest that most of us may consider using, email retraction. 

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