By ALEX WILLIAMS

Mail Goggles, a new feature on Google’s Gmail program, is intended to help eradicate a scourge that few knew existed: late-night drunken e-mailing.
The experimental program requires any user who enables the function to perform five simple math problems in 60 seconds before sending e-mails between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. on weekends. That time frame apparently corresponds to the gap between cocktail No. 1 and cocktail No. 4, when tapping out an e-mail message to an ex-partner or a coworker can be particularly hazardous.
In an age when so much of our routine communication is accomplished with our fingertips, are we becoming so tethered to our keyboards that we really need the technological equivalent of trigger locks on firearms- In interviews with people who confessed to imbibing and typing at the same time - sometimes with regrettable consequences - the answer seems to be yes.
Kate Allen Stukenberg, a magazine editor in Houston, said that “the thing that is disappointing about Mail Goggles is that it’s only on Gmail,” because many people need cellphone protection, given the widespread practice of drunk text-messaging.
In September, after Hurricane Ike ripped through her hometown, Ms. Stukenberg, 29, said, she found herself consoling a friend who had used the tragedy as an excuse to send a drunken text-message to reconnect with an exboyfriend - a move she later regretted. “She said that Ike had messed up her apartment so she had no place to stay, so could she stay at his house,” Ms. Stukenberg recalled.
Indeed, the Mail Goggles program itself was born of embarrassment. A Gmail engineer named Jon Perlow wrote the program after sending his share of regrettable late-night missives, including a plea to rekindle a relationship with an old girlfriend, he wrote on the company’s Gmail blog.
“We’ve all been there before, unfortunately,” said Jeremy Bailenson, director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. The edge of the abyss is much closer in an era when so many people carry personal digital assistants containing hundreds of contact numbers .
And e-mail messages can be particularly potent because they constitute what social scientists call “asynchronous” communication, meaning that exchanges between people do not happen in real time, unlike face-to-face or telephone conversations. People can respond to work-related messages hours after they leave the office - a risky proposition if they happen to log on after stumbling home from the bar.
“If you’ve completely lost all motor skills, Mail Goggles probably isn’t necessary,” Ryan Dodge, a dating blogger who lives in Brooklyn, said in an e-mail message. “But there’s a dangerous point of intoxication where you’re lucid enough to operate a keyboard, but drunk enough to think that professing your love via Facebook to that girl in your 11th grade homeroom is a stellar idea.”