Spooge's Spit Up - Mail Goggles

SEATTLE - Here's the scenario: It's Friday night, and what began as an innocent happy-hour margarita morphed into a few pitchers. After all, those tacos were salty.

Bidding friends adieu, you go home and decide a quick email check is in order. And there it is: a message from your ex. Or your boss. Or that friend you're secretly mad at.

If you're the kind of person who types tipsy and regrets it in the morning, Google's "Mail Goggles", a test-phase feature in the free Gmail service, might save you angst.

The Goggles can kick in late at night on weekends. The feature requires you to solve a few easy maths problems before hitting "send". If your logical thinking skills are intact, Google is betting you're sober enough to work out the repercussions of sending that diatribe you just drafted.

And if you can't multiply two by five, you'll probably thank Google in the morning.

To activate Goggles, Gmail users should click the "Settings" link at the top of a Gmail page, then go to the "Labs" section.

There's no shame in admitting that sometimes you need a little extra help. 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 through a text message. Or the time I sent that late night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together," he wrote on a company blog.

The name is derived from the slang term "beer goggles", or the curious effect of alcohol on one's ability to see the true nature of that "cutie" at the other end of the bar.

But you can set up Mail Goggles to protect you from yourself at other emotionally vulnerable times — before your morning coffee, for example, or right after "Grey's Anatomy."

"What a great idea - this will save many jobs and relationships hehe"