If you thought drunk dialing was a problem, consider the notion of "inebriated email". But don't worry: Google provides a new feature in Gmail to protect you from yourself... unless you're REALLY good at math.

Gmail Labs is Google's name for the set of "experimental" features they've made available for Gmail. At your discretion (just click the green flask near the top right of your Gmail page), you can enable or disable various functions that are sort of in "beta" (maybe even "alpha" for some of them), that aren't necessarily for everybody but might be for you. These features range from the mundane (display messages in fixed width fonts with different date formats, or add profile pictures of people you're talking to in Google Chat) to the quirky ("star" your messages with a variety of different-colored star icons, or play a game while reading mail).

Some of them are really kind of useful. Enabling "Quote Selected Text" means that if you've selected a block of text in an email you're reading, only that block will be included as quoted text if you reply. (This is very nice when you're responding to a message in a very long email thread.) "Forgotten Attachment Detector" will display a warning if you include words like"attached" or "attachment" in an email, and haven't attached any files when you click "Send".

Google's latest addition to Gmail Labs is "Mail Goggles". When this feature is enabled, email sent during the critical late weekend hours (10pm to 4am, Friday and Saturday nights is considered suspect. Perhaps you composed a note to someone expressing your undying affection (or everlasting hatred) in a state of whatever form of intoxication floats your boat. Before you are allowed to send it, Gmail presents you with a series of math problems. If you're capable of answering them correctly, boing, your mail goes through. If not, well, clearly you were in no state to send email to anyone.

OK, this isn't quite the "Oh sh*t, UNSEND!" function we may wish we had (which some of us may remember in limited form on AOL). But it's one small step in that direction, assuming you need this kind of constraint on your emailing behavior. The problem is, just as drunk dialing occurs most often on cellphones, inebriated emails of this sort are most likely to be sent from mobile devices, too—and this feature, like most of the Gmail Labs features, only works on the desktop, not on the mobile version of Gmail accessed from phones and PDAs.

Ironically, alongside this presumably face-saving feature, Gmail has given us the potentially face-losing feature known as "Default Reply-to-All", which as the name implies, sends your email responses by default to all the people on the recipient list, rather than just to the sender. This is something I would be far more concerned about, and in fact I can recall numerous times that choosing reply-to-all (usually by accident) was the wrong choice. ("Jill, thanks for sending this notice to Jack. He's an idiot and if you didn't mention this to him explicitly he might enable the Default Reply-to-All function and..."--[REPLY ALL]--oops!)

When it comes to protecting you from yourself in email exchanges, Gmail giveth and Gmail taketh away.