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New in Labs: Stop sending mail you later regret
- alexandros 18y agofunny they dont mention alcohol or drunkenness explicitly anywhere in the email, yet everyone knows what this is about.
- michaelneale 18y ago>alcohol or drunkenness From experience one has followed the other. but YMMV ;) I think both an email client and SCM client should be integrated with a breath tester.
- jcl 18y agoI also liked their rationale for Chrome's "incognito mode": "For times when you want to browse in stealth mode, for example, to plan surprises like gifts or birthdays, Google Chrome offers the incognito browsing mode." Google enables our vices without actually identifying them. :)
- ncognito 18y agoI actually did use Chrome's incognito mode to buy a birthday gift the other day. On the other hand, the gift was a vibrator. Not sure which side this ends up supporting. (Regular YCer here, just don't need this linked to my actual name)
- jrockway 18y agodon't need this linked to my actual name Yeah, you wouldn't want anyone to know you enjoy sex.
- ryanspahn 18y agoI'd prefer an option where I send it and it rests on gmail's server for X amount of time I specify (minutes, hours, days). I could then go back to it and edit it at will or delete it before the send time has passed.
- smoody 18y agoexactly the approach i would have taken and i think their solution demonstrates, to some degree, what can happen when a company is focused on hiring engineers instead of great product people.
- raganwald 18y agoLet's not argue too much. I agree that what you say is true, but I wouldn't say it's a bad thing. Think back 30 years. Product people were thinking up new main frames, researchers were thinking up the Eldorado workstation, and hackers were thinking up personal computers. Our industry has really benefited from a "throw it against the wall and see what sticks" mentality. Is this a good feature? I don't know, but I do like the idea of Google inventing 100 or 1,000 such features and seeing if one of them is a winner. I am not so sure that a product management team with a gating and evaluation process will do a better job of picking features than--no offense googlers--a million monkeys randomly inventing features they think are neat-o.
- mechanical_fish 18y agoI saw the headline and had the exact same thought. "Oh, look, someone's invented that time-delay feature that I've wanted for years!"
- paulgb 18y agoThat would have another use, too: hiding your sleep schedule from the recipient. You could write an email at 3:00 AM, set an 8 hour delay, and appear to have regular sleep patterns.
- 18y ago
- billroberts 18y agoSurely google can correlate the contents of your mail with blogs on getting fired/splitting up with your partner/falling out with your relatives and advise you whether or not you should send it.
- raganwald 18y agoFunny you mention that, I used to have a Mac mail app (forget which) that had a feature like this. It did some kind of keyword counting thing and would display one, two, or three chili peppers next to inbound and outbound emails. There was some scripting built in, and one of the things you could do was add a one hour sending delay to anything with a certain number of chilis. The combination of visual display and scripted "let me sleep on it" features worked really well.
- gojomo 18y agoThe chili-peppers language-analysis is Eudora's "Mood Watch" feature. Never used it, but always thought it was a good idea. Similarly, email clients should catch references to attachments that aren't there, and ask "do you really want to send this without an attachment?" Even more generally, they could recognize (and allow to be configured) certain addresses as requiring additional confirmation before sending -- so a mistaken overbroad or misdirected CC becomes less common. (I'm thinking: first time you send to an address, you get a confirmation popup, and a chance to classify this address: require dialog confirm; require captcha/retype-of-name confirm; require waiting period; require confirm if combined with other address; etc.)
- BrandonM 18y agoSimilarly, email clients should catch references to attachments that aren't there, and ask "do you really want to send this without an attachment?" This was a Better GMail (Firefox extension) feature that is now available in GMail Labs under Settings.
- raganwald 18y agoThanks, it was Eudora!
- gopher 18y agoWTF? Looks like GMail is feature complete and they dunno what to do... I bet the next thing we'll see is random signatures. Looks like the are implementing a bunch of useless features that all got mentioned in Usenet 15 years ago.
- mtw 18y agoi thought that this was an April fool's joke
- jrockway 18y agoThere was a similar one. I think it involved time travel instead of answering math problems, though.
- byrneseyeview 18y agoI bet the next thing we'll see is random signatures. If you try to actually turn this on in your Gmail settings, you will scroll past their random signature option.
- unalone 18y agoGmail Labs includes a ton of pet projects that various employees thought might be neat. Hence why they're Labs products. I kind of like it when they implement stuff like that, just because it's fun.
- newmediaclay 18y agoBeautiful. Now they just need one for texts, since that's where I usually get myself into late night trouble...
- redorb 18y agoanother version: Set timer on email, then receive a text message and you can reply (1) to send (9) to not send.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- ComputerGuru 18y agoI'm still waiting for the downright trivial "bottom-posting" Labs application - it can't take more than a couple lines of code to have GMail set the caret below the quoted text, and have those couple of empty lines that Gmail generates appear after the text as well.
- firestrike 18y agoBrilliant. Except for those individuals who prove more mathematically adept than socially to begin with...
- pmjordan 18y agoIt should have a difficulty setting, the higher levels could ask you to solve integrals or differential equations. :)
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- shaunxcode 18y agoNow we just need someone to write a greasemonkey script which auto fills the answers for you so you can send emails right when you want...
- jbert 18y agoThat was my thought as well. Of course, the next step is to have an hardened mail goggles feature which requires you to write a greasemonkey script in order to send an email.
- icco 18y agoWhat? Really? You people are crazy.
- BrandonM 18y agoToo bad that I'm still good at math when I am drunk. I was out at a bar one night, and I "came to" walking down the railroad tracks on the way back home (way out of the way, and not exactly safe). I didn't even remember cashing out my bar tab, but lo and behold, when I checked my credit card transactions a couple days later, I tipped right around 25% ($85 total on a $67 tab) -- this is the same way I would tip sober. If you want a moral in this story, don't drink two 1-liter mugs of micro-brewery beer within a couple hours and then continue drinking Guinness and shots ($30+ worth!) after relocating to a popular Irish bar.
- MaysonL 18y agoThey need to make the questions harder!