Digital Crosstalk

Gogglemail

Posted by Brian | Filed under blogging

We’ve all been there – it’s late at night, you’ve had a few drinks and you’ve decided that it would be a great idea to tell your boss exactly what you think of them before letting your ex-girlfriend know that it would be amazing if you could get back together. At the time you may feel like you’ve done what you needed to, in the morning you often wish you had someone looking over your shoulder ready to ask “Do you really think that’s a good idea?” Ever the innovators, Google have added a great new function to their e-mail service – Mail Goggles.

Created to help prevent people send messages they’ll regret in the morning, the new function is tests your thinking by making you solve maths puzzles before letting you confirm that you want to send.

By clicking on the ‘Labs’ link in ‘Settings’ users can set this handy feature up and then change the times and days that the puzzles are forced upon you, as well as letting you change the difficulty of the questions.

There are some other pretty nifty ideas in the labs section which I didn’t know about – Email Addict blocks the screen for 15 minutes forcing you to take a break and Forgotten Attachment Detector reminds you if you’ve mentioned attaching a file but have forgotten to actually include any attachments.

Whilst the security feature could probably be quite easily bypassed, it’s certainly given people something to talk about, as people fear for the state of computers if potential late night Romeos can’t get their messages out to their loved ones.

If you think this isn’t enough to protect you, test yourself try saying Google Goggles really quickly ten times…

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Tags: digital