Ever have one of those mornings where you wake up and can't remember the events from the night before.  Come on, we've all had them at least one time in our lives.  You wake up hung-over, walk into work and find yourself in either the bosses office or, even worse, the HR department with no clue as to what is going on.  You later find out that the night before after hours at Moe's Tavern, you stumbled home, logged into your gmail account, sent out an inappropriate email to a colleague, and then crashed in your easy chair.  In the morning, that coworker immediately forwarded it to the HR department and now you are in the hot seat - Doh!

Once you send something out through email, it's too late.  Wouldn't it be nice if there were some way to defend against this stupid form of idiocy?  Well, thanks to Google, now there is!

Introducing Google Goggles!

If you too find yourself constantly having to backtrack due to unfortunate emails, then never fear.  Here's a blurb from the modules description:

Google strives to make the world's information useful. Mail you send late night on the weekends may be useful but you may regret it the next morning. Solve some simple math problems and you're good to go. Otherwise, get a good night's sleep and try again in the morning.

So, you can now configure days of the week and times during those days where you have to answer various math questions before being able to send off an email. 

Here's a step-by-step guide to help protect you from your future intoxicated email blunders.

1. Log into your GMail account (sorry it's not available with Google Apps for Domains yet).
2. Click on "Settings" in the top right of the page.
3. Click on the "Labs" settings.
4. Scroll down to "Mail Goggles".
5. Select the "Enable" radio button.
6. Click "Save Changes".
7. Click on the "Settings" link again.
8. In the General settings there is now an option for the Mail Goggles.  Here, you can specify what days and what hours on those days you would like to be "challenged" before being able to send an email.
9. Click "Save Changes".

Worried about the questions being too easy?  Well, don't!  There is another option for the difficulty level of the problems to challenge even the hard core math wiz's out there.

Now, if only Google would build an Exchange version to control what goes over our internal Non-Business alias here at work I'd be a happy camper! B-).

-Joe