So its Friday night and you’ve been drinking a tad bit more to ward off the memories of a bad week. As you become tipsy you are tempted to let loose your wrath on your boss by writing a fiery email. These situations can have serious repercussions that may lead to people losing their jobs, losing their wives, lovers and friends and in worse cases, landing up in jail for abuse.

To prevent such mails which you’ll regret sending in the morning, Gmail Labs have come up with an ingenious solution – the Gmail Mail Goggles. To enable the Mail Goggles navigate to Settings>Labs in the Gmail window, browse to Mail Goggles and click Enable. You can also send feedback related to this gadget here.

How does Mail Goggles work?

The name ‘Mail Goggles’ is derived from the slang “Beer Goggles,” which states the effect of alcohol on one’s ability to see the true nature of a few seemingly beautiful ladies. It is said that Gmail engineer Jon Perlow designed Goggles with his own weaknesses in mind. “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 e-mail to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together,” he wrote when announcing Mail Goggles on a company blog.

Mail Goggles let you set a time and days(usually weekends, but if you are a way-too-regular visitor to the bar you can choose to activate it on all days) and a difficulty level. The Mail Goggles settings are a part of the General Settings.

So if your write any mails on the specified day after the stipulated time(usually nights) then a Mail Goggle comes into action and prompts you to solve some simple mathematics problems in a limited time. It assumes that if you are in a state where you can logically think and perform some easy calculations, then you deserve to send an email. Otherwise you don’t – and that is where it steps in.

So if you can’t add 23 and 13, its not that nice an idea to write an email. If you give wrong answers Google says some nice, comforting words like – “Water and bed for you. Or try again.”

Sometimes it pays to get help, even if it is from a machine. This is like those tests for drunken driving the only difference being these are not to determine punishments, but to save you from some. Don’t let alcohol ruin something which took a lifetime to build up – use Mail Goggles!