Say goodbye to errant e-mails and drunken dials and say hello to a future in which you can no longer blame the computer for all the dumb stuff that comes out of your fingertips.
"I got an e-mail from someone I had dated a few years before -- a random e-mail, from out of the blue," said Katie Feola, 28, a lawyer from New York remembering her own recent variation on a common Internet blunder. "I went to forward the e-mail to a friend to share the joke that he had contacted me out of nowhere. In my message, I wrote some pretty rude things about him. It wasn't until after I had hit 'send' that I quickly realized I hadn't hit 'forward' but I had hit 'reply.'
"I wish there was a way I could have gone back to undo that message." she said. "Although part of me thinks he deserved to find out what I really thought of him."
Gmail Users Get 'Panic Button'
Google has yet to develop a program that will eradicate the advances of caddish exes, but it rolled out an application Thursday that will allow Gmail users, such as Feola, to stop an e-mail from being delivered with the click of what the company aptly calls a "panic button."
Users of Gmail, the popular Web-based, e-mail service, can now install an "Undo Send" application that gives them five seconds to stop an e-mail from getting delivered.
On the Official Gmail Blog where the new application was announced, Michael Leggett, a Google user-experience designer who created the application, said it was all those sent messages that contained mistakes or promised files that were never attached that led him to design the "undo" button.
"This feature can't pull back an e-mail that's already gone; it just holds your message for five seconds so you have a chance to hit the panic button," Leggett wrote.
Beware the Late-Night, Alcohol-Induced E-Mails
Users looking to turn on the "Undo Send" button can find it in Gmail Labs under "Settings."
The recent proliferation of programs designed to make you not look like an idiot are "partially gimmicky" but also reflect a desire to keep communication technology working at the speed of thought and not the speed of your bandwidth connection, said Nate Westheimer, a tech blogger and the entrepreneur-in-residence at Rose Tech Ventures in New York City.
"Everything is becoming more real time," he said. "Technology makes things more immediate, which means screwups happen even faster. In the past, you wrote a letter, proofread it, put on the postage, walked to a mailbox and thought about what you wrote. There were opportunities to say, 'I probably shouldn't say that.' Now you just type and send."
Google has been something of an industry leader in creating applications intended to keep people from making asses of themselves via e-mail.
Google Says No to Drinking and Drafting
The company last year introduced a service called Mail Goggles (a playful riff on Beer Goggles) that asks users to complete a few simple math problems within 60 seconds before being allowed to send off those late-night, alcohol-induced e-mails.
