The Unsent Email

In 2008, a Google engineer named Jon Perlow built a strange little feature for Gmail. He called it Mail Goggles. The idea was simple. If you tried to send an email late at night, Gmail would stop you. First, you had to solve a few math problems. Get them right, and your message went through. Fail, and Gmail assumed you were in no state to be emailing anyone. It was clever. Funny. But also deeply human.

Perlow admitted the inspiration came from experience. “Sometimes I send emails that I shouldn't send,” he wrote on Google’s official blog. “Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her. Or the time I emailed my ex to get back together.”

Mail Goggles recognized what pure logic couldn't. That our digital impulsivity peaks precisely when our judgment wanes.

At some point, Perlow noticed a pattern. A gap between the part of him that wanted to hit send, and the part that knew better. That moment of self-awareness—quiet, maybe even uncomfortable—is what the Yogi philosophy calls the difference between the surface mind and the deeper mind. True intuition arrives as a gentle nudge. A calm knowing. “This is right.” Or, “not this.”