Google Labs launched a new fea­ture yes­ter­day called Mail Gog­gles to help pre­vent send­ing emails you might regret later! By default it is only active late night on the week­ends when they think you’ll need it most, but you can adjust the set­tings to have it on when­ever you like. If you’re try­ing to send a late night email, Mail Gog­gles will prompt you with a few sim­ple math prob­lems after you click send. They don’t say if you have to get them right or answer in a cer­tain amount of time even though the pic­ture leads you to believe there is some sort of timer involved.

When I first saw the head­line I thought it was an April’s Fool joke, but April is nowhere close! Do peo­ple really send out that many drunken emails? I get an occa­sional late night IM or Face­book mes­sage where it’s pretty obvi­ous that per­son is being skep­ti­cally hon­est or friendly, but I’m in col­lege so it’s nor­mal. The Gmail team acts like these sort of things hap­pen in the pro­fes­sional world, too, which is scary. “Like that late night memo — I mean mis­sion state­ment — to the entire firm.”

It’s funny they took the time to cook some­thing like this up, but is there an ulte­rior motive? Is there a more big­ger and bet­ter fea­ture that could come from this to offer some con­ve­nience or improved pro­duc­tiv­ity? The least they should do is deny you from send­ing that embar­rass­ing email and save it as a draft if you don’t answer the ques­tions cor­rectly or in a short enough period of time. Maybe not allow for it to send for x amount of hours depend­ing on how ter­ri­ble you did on the math so you’re stone sober when you review it?