It’s Friday night, and after spending a few hours on Welch Avenue, you stumble back to your dorm room and flop in front of your computer. You open up your Gmail, and discover the alcohol you’ve imbibed has finally given you the courage — or inspiration — to write that scathing e-mail you’ve been longing to send to an annoying, if well-meaning, friend. Or a draconian boss. Or that ex- you’ve been obsessing over for months.

You hit send and crawl into your loft, certain that this time you’ve finally managed to convey your true feelings in a creative and witty manner.

We’ve all done it, right? If you’re lucky, the only embarrassment you’ve had to suffer has been over your drunk typing skills, but as likely as not you’ve sent something with further-reaching consequences than some ribbing from the grammar police.

Luckily for you, Google has recently come out with an optional new feature to help prevent the careless sending of e-mails you might regret later. If you enable Mail Goggles on your Gmail account, you’ll be greeted with a friendly pop-up message if you try to send an e-mail on a weekend night — weekend nights are the default setting, but you can adjust it to fit your schedule:

“It’s that time of day. Gmail aims to help you in many ways. Are you sure you want to send this? Answer some simple math problems to verify.”

You can set the difficulty as well, but the problems don’t really get much harder than a third-grade level — something those of you who can do calculus in your sleep may not appreciate. While some people may find this type of feature a little too invasive and mothering for their taste, many will welcome all the insulation from Social Darwinism that they can get.

We’re excited about this new Gmail feature, but we want to know when we can expect similar measures from our phone companies. Preventing thoughtless e-mails is all well and good, but most of us have more problems with drunk dialing and sending alcohol-inspired text messages. If we had to answer a series of math problems before sending each text, it might not be worth the effort, and we’d go find something less incriminating to do with our drunken selves.

Although in the age of video-capturing phones, a sappy karaoke song might be as lasting as a text-based gaffe.