It’s an old cliche, the beer goggles. The theory being that, after a few drinks (too many), things get a little blurry, and what you think you see you do not in fact see. There have been all sorts of strange, beautiful, awful, sad and happy things done while under the influence of any number of intoxicants, but now you can rest assured that if you use Gmail (Google’s popular email service) email won’t be one of them.

A clever engineer down in Mountain View, Jon Perlow, created “Mail Goggles” as a sort of sobriety test to help prevent sending that email to your ex at 2AM on Sunday morning (you know, THAT one …). What happens is that when you type a message and hit the send button you are presented with a series of math problems to solve in under a minute. The problems aren’t that difficult, but they do require the user to stop and think a moment. From the horse’s mouth:

Sometimes I send messages I shouldn’t send. Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message. Or the time I sent that late night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together. Gmail can’t always prevent you from sending messages you might later regret, but today we’re launching a new Labs feature I wrote called Mail Goggles which may help.

When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?

By default, Mail Goggles is only active late night on the weekend as that is the time you’re most likely to need it. Once enabled, you can adjust when it’s active in the General settings.

Hopefully Mail Goggles will prevent many of you out there from sending messages you wish you hadn’t. Like that late night memo — I mean mission statement — to the entire firm.

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