Spring Break
The Daily OrangeGoogle aims to prevent drunk emails
By Talia Pollock
Posted: 10/22/08, 5:13 AM EST Section: Feature
Nicole Coulanges said she has seen too many times students wake up in the morning wondering what happened the night before. After a shower, a glass of orange juice and a hearty brunch, they manage to convince themselves that they didn't do anything seriously worth regretting.
Coulanges admits the same has happened to her. She never thought she did anything crazy during the night, but she would wake up with some mistakes in her cell phone sent box.
"Yeah, I didn't think I did anything crazy," said Coulanges, a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. "I get through my day and see the sent messages and I'm like 'What did I just do?' I wish that someone had taken my phone or I had left my phone at home."
To prevent drunk people from sending out inappropriate e-mails, Google has created a new Labs feature for Gmail, called Mail Goggles which requires users to correctly solve five math problems before getting the go ahead to send their e-mails.
Coulanges said she has opened up her cell phone, taken a look at the dialed calls, read through the outbox messages and consequently buried her head in her hands.
"Sometimes I'm like 'Oh crap, look what I just sent - I look like an idiot,'" she said.
Gmail engineer Jon Perlow can relate.
On the company's Gmail blog, Perlow wrote, "Sometimes I send messages I shouldn't send," referring to the regrettable incident with a late night e-mail and an attempt to rekindle old flames with an ex-girlfriend.
"Gmail can't always prevent you from sending messages you may later regret. …But Mail Goggles may help," Perlow wrote.
No, a breathalyzer doesn't pop out of the screen, nor does a calculator to compute your blood alcohol content. Rather, math problems with difficulty levels ranging from an easy level one to a most difficult level five appear.
Questions cover the four basic arithmetic operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The person must correctly solve problems like 33+8, 99-83, 4x10 and 56/7 in order to send a message.
Coulanges admits the same has happened to her. She never thought she did anything crazy during the night, but she would wake up with some mistakes in her cell phone sent box.
"Yeah, I didn't think I did anything crazy," said Coulanges, a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. "I get through my day and see the sent messages and I'm like 'What did I just do?' I wish that someone had taken my phone or I had left my phone at home."
To prevent drunk people from sending out inappropriate e-mails, Google has created a new Labs feature for Gmail, called Mail Goggles which requires users to correctly solve five math problems before getting the go ahead to send their e-mails.
Coulanges said she has opened up her cell phone, taken a look at the dialed calls, read through the outbox messages and consequently buried her head in her hands.
"Sometimes I'm like 'Oh crap, look what I just sent - I look like an idiot,'" she said.
Gmail engineer Jon Perlow can relate.
On the company's Gmail blog, Perlow wrote, "Sometimes I send messages I shouldn't send," referring to the regrettable incident with a late night e-mail and an attempt to rekindle old flames with an ex-girlfriend.
"Gmail can't always prevent you from sending messages you may later regret. …But Mail Goggles may help," Perlow wrote.
No, a breathalyzer doesn't pop out of the screen, nor does a calculator to compute your blood alcohol content. Rather, math problems with difficulty levels ranging from an easy level one to a most difficult level five appear.
Questions cover the four basic arithmetic operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The person must correctly solve problems like 33+8, 99-83, 4x10 and 56/7 in order to send a message.
Viewing Comments 1 - 1 of 1
Chris
posted 10/30/08 @ 12:25 AM EST
Way to go, Daily Orange! This story was first reported on campus on an episode of Citrus TV news almost a week before it was in your paper!
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