Mark Daniels: From beer goggles to e-mail goggles

Have you ever woken up the morning after a heavy drinking session, thinking how amazing it was that you managed to cross the road safely from the pub, get in to the house quietly and then climbed gently into your cosy bed?

The reality, you soon discover, is that you narrowly avoided getting run over by a passing motorist, you woke half the neighbourhood up crashing through your kitchen as you tried to make a cup of coffee, and you fell on to the bed with your trousers still wrapped around your ankles. Your wife will then moan to all and sundry about the level of your snoring and your impotent advances in the early hours of the morning and the fact that beer breath is not conducive to intimate responses.

And then you'll discover that, between the coffee and the bed, you sent an e-mail to your boss telling him just what you think of his latest mission statement, called him a name that rhymes with tanker and advised him just what you're hoping to do to his secretary at the Christmas Party.

I'm quite familiar with the art of mis-messaging people. Many's a time when I've woken up in the morning only to find that I've sent an e-mail to somebody I shouldn't have and I once had a conversation with somebody over Microsoft's Instant Messenger tool that I had no idea had taken place. More than once one of my regular customers and I have lamented the fact that laptops don't have breathalysers built in to them to prevent drunken users from having access to their e-mail or websites such as Facebook.

As the plethora of ways we can communicate with each other grows, so do the chances of messing it all up. Selecting the wrong contact in your mobile phone's telephone book can have disastrous consequences and I once sent my wife a text message saying "I'm on my way home, be naked and I need a good snog." It was, fortunately, actually meant for my wife, but unfortunately I had forgotten to use the key on my Nokia's predictive text software that rotated the words to the one I really needed. What Ali received was: "I'm on my way home, be naked and I need a good pooh."

Needless to say, she was fully clothed and looking slightly nervous when I returned home.

It seems, however, that the boffins at Google have finally had the foresight to think up something that might just help the late night e-mailer. User's of Google's e-mail service, Google Mail, now have access to Mail Goggles, a special filter that you can programme to activate between certain hours and on certain days (by default, it's only set to late nights at the weekend) and which will then ask the user to successfully complete a number of mathematical challenges before allowing them to continue with sending their message.

You can adjust the difficulty of the mathematical equations, so even the most inebriated superbrain might find them challenging, and if you are a Google Mail user you can find this nifty little tool in the Labs section under Settings.

It's a simple solution, yet quite effective.

But it still doesn't stop me from using my mobile phone to send an abusive text to a customer who just won't stop singing on Friday nights...