Are you sure you want to send this?

MANY years ago, in the days before mobile telephones automatically recorded your sent messages, I woke up after an alcohol-fuelled night out to find my phone in my hand. I had fallen asleep post-text. I had no way of knowing what I'd sent, or to whom. What I did know was that – given the complicated state of my personal life at the time and the fact I couldn't actually recall the act – it was unlikely to have been particularly edifying.

I spent a horrific day with churning stomach waiting for someone to respond and point out just how much I had humiliated myself. Once you've put something in writing, it's so much harder to take back.

Because it takes so much less courage than phoning, it's all too easy to fall victim to the perils of drunk texting at some point. "I lnve u n wamt 2 hav ur babids" Oh God, why, why, why?

So news that someone at Google has come up with an add-on to Gmail called "Mail Goggles" appears to be inspired. It is aimed at preventing us from the worse excesses of drunken misuse of communication technology, via a setting that uses a maths quiz to test our "alertness" before allowing us to fire off any late-night messages.

Many's the morning-after my friends and I have sat ruefully scrolling through our mistyped and unwarranted declarations of love, hate or desire (sometimes, if gin was involved, all three), speculating on the fortune that could be made by anyone clever enough to invent a breathalyser feature for mobile phones.

Then the advent of Facebook made it all so, so much worse. Of course it's been possible to e-mail drunk for years now, but until we were able to catch up with the latest goings on of all our friends and acquaintances on one helpful little web page – there was no real temptation to turn on our laptops when arriving home from the pub.

Suddenly, we had unlimited characters to whom to type out all our feelings, ideas and hopes and opinions of the boss and send them into cyberspace with one click of the e-mail send button. Worse still, we can indulge in instant messaging with someone on the other side of the world, where it might be 10am on a work day, making our screen-emboldened flirting even less appropriate.

E-mail communications are notoriously open to misinterpretation at the best of times, never mind those composed with a glass of chenin blanc in your non-typing hand. As for the horror of waking up to discover that you've filled in your Facebook status box with the word "horny", as happened to a friend of mine (for those still unfamiliar with the networking site, your "status" is a brief description you fill in which will then appear beside your name and the word "is" on the homepage of everyone you know) – well, it just doesn't bear thinking about.

Even those sensible enough to avoid being drunk in charge of technology can still suffer. Just what is the etiquette for responding to surprise and unwanted declarations of love sent at 1am by someone who is clearly under the influence? Exactly how many mildly incoherent and disturbingly personal messages from an ex do you have to put up with before you can officially declare them a cyberstalker? And when the one you never quite got over writes, saying it was all a mistake and they want you back, you may desperately want to believe it, but you can't ignore the fact the missive was sent at 3am on a Saturday.

Mail Goggles only works on Google's own e-mail service, but maybe one day someone will develop something that can be set to work on any form of communication. Unfortunately, the channels for regretful communications are almost endless and, if you're determined to make your feelings clear, you'll find a way to do it.

But the idea of a kindly computer whose role is to stop us ruining our lives, or at least embarrassing ourselves, definitely has potential. A kind of electronic mum/best friend, but with none of the human agenda.

It would tell us (tactfully) whether we really did look fat in that dress and not say that we look great because it was jealous. It would advise us whether our latest date really is a good catch and not just because it wants you to produce grandchildren for it soon.

Sadly, there's no computer programme in the world that will stop us making fools of ourselves after a few drinks. The wine-driven instinct to spill out our innermost feelings is a force so powerful, even the gods of Google don't have the strength to stop it once in full flow, because I might not be able to tell you how much 37+19 is, but it's still really, really important you know that "I lnve u".