Activate Gmail Goggles to Prevent Sending Embarrassing Emails

Maybe you’ve had these mornings when after an all-night drinking spree, you wake up with a massive hangover and you don’t know what the heck you did at the computer when you got home. All you remember is that you’ve been ranting on hours non-stop about that ex of yours and that you’d send your ex a long email when you get home. You also remember opening up your computer, going to Gmail… and everything else is a blur.

So you quickly open up Gmail and to your horror, you see in your sent items folder that you’ve sent not only one, but five long emails to your ex, with each one becoming more incomprehensible. And you sent the exact same email to two business contacts, and one random stranger. At this point you just want to curl up and probably disappear from the world.

Thank goodness for Google Labs for understanding people with impaired judgment, for they have rolled out Gmail Goggles. According to Gmail engineer John Perlow, “Sometimes I send messages I shouldn’t send,” he confesses on the Gmail blog. “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.”

Basically, Gmail Goggles would ask you “Do you really want to send that email?” And then it’ll promptly ask you a few math questions that you must answer within a time period to keep you from sending stuff if you’re not in the right state of mind.

And Gmail Goggles is active late night on weekends by default, but you can set it according to your needs. So how do you enable it? Just open up your Gmail account and click on settings:

Then go to the Labs tab within settings:

Then within the Labs tab, just enable Mail Goggles:

And you’ll have a way for you to not send those embarrassing drunken emails to exes and those “company memos” to everyone in your address book. It may not save the world, but it’ll save you a lot of time because you won’t be emailing everyone an apology in the morning while you’re doubling over because of a hangover-induced headache.