Waking up after a long night of partying to a sent box full of incoherent e-mails probably isn’t the best way to begin a day, especially when they are directed at an ex or to the co-worker you’ve been secretly harboring feelings for.
Luckily, Google has developed an application to help prevent these embarrassing “drunk e-mails.”
“Sometimes I send messages I shouldn’t send. Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over a text message. Or the time I sent that late-night e-mail 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,” Gmail engineer Jon Perlow posted on the official Gmail blog on Oct. 6.
Named after the term “beer goggles,” Mail Goggles can be voluntarily enabled by users.
The standard settings activate the program from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. on weekends, but the day and time can both be adjusted to the user’s preferences.
The program assesses a user’s sobriety by asking five simple math questions that must be answered correctly within 60 seconds in order to send the e-mail.
“I don’t think a program like this is necessary. I usually can’t remember, but I’ve (drunk dialed). Most guys have done it. I know some girls who have, too,” said Howard Paras, a fifth-year film student.
“If you’re going to give out your contact information, stuff like this is liable to happen. You have to learn. It’s a learning process.”
The math problems are basic addition, multiplication, subtraction and division problems.
The difficulty of the problems can also be adjusted depending on the user’s preference and math proficiency.
If the problems are answered incorrectly, the user is greeted with the message “Water and bed for you. Or try again.”
If the time runs out before the questions are answered, the application reads, “Oops looks like your reflexes are a little too slow. Try again.”
Users have the option to continue attempting to answer the questions, or to cancel and leave the message unsent.
“I think the software would be useful if they could apply it to Facebook or text messaging. I’m not familiar with people sending e-mails while intoxicated, I’ve never received one,” said Chelsea Berg, a second-year international development studies student.
“I know some people send e-mails to professors and TAs late at night, and they wouldn’t want to send an inappropriate e-mail,” said Berg.
Although Mail Goggles is geared toward drunken e-mails, regrettable e-mails can trouble senders just as much.
Mistakes that result from carelessness or frustration, like choosing the wrong name in an address book or sending flames to a co-worker can cause as much embarrassment as a drunk e-mail.
Eudora, another e-mail client, has software called Mood Watch that is similar to Mail Goggles. It scans and rates e-mails based on the amount of aggressive and insulting language.
The scan is not just limited to curse words but also includes rude and offensive phrases.
Unlike Mail Goggles, Mood Watch does not prevent users from sending the e-mail, but lets them know how offensive it is on a scale of one to three.
Research by Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler in their book “Reducing Social Context Cues: Electronic Mail in Organizational Communications” showed that “people behaved irresponsibly more often in e-mail than they did in face-to-face conversations,” which is why software such as Mood Watch was developed.
Similarly, Microsoft Office has “e-mail recall,” which can be used after forgetting to send an attachment or to recall an embarrassing e-mail.
If the recipient has yet to open the e-mail, the replacement e-mail takes its spot in the person’s inbox.
If the e-mail is already marked as read, the replacement is stored in the recipient’s e-mail with the original e-mail, along with a notification that the sender wants to replace the e-mail.
Steven Cho, a second-year business and economics student said he thinks a texting recall program would be more useful than an e-mail program like Mail Goggles.
E-mail is generally only used for professional matters, and sending e-mail to a teaching assistant or a professor while drunk isn’t a logical attitude. That is not what people think about when they drink, he said.
“It’s embarrassing when you’re writing a (text) message about a person and you send it to that person because you were thinking about them when you wrote it. Especially if it’s mean,” said Anne Kuriakose, a third-year business and economics student.
To enable Mail Goggles in Gmail, click on the “Labs” tab under settings, and select “Mail Goggles.” This setting and any other Lab feature can be enabled or disabled at any time.