I was going to write about the release of IE 8 and all the hoopla accompanying it, but my good friends in Mountain View upstaged their rivals in Redmond (in my eyes at least) with the release of the infinitely more useful Gmail Undo Send feature. The name couldn’t be more apt as it allows quick-triggered e-mailers a five-second window to “unsend” any unfinished or inappropriate e-mail message.

Why five seconds? Is that enough time to identify any potentially embarrassing e-mail mistakes? As Google product manager Keith Coleman explained to CNET’s Rafe Needleman:

…internal testing of the feature, which was created by a Google engineer in Japan as a side project, indicated that five seconds was an appropriate compromise between the ability to recall an errant message and the need to not introduce lag to e-mail conversations. "Adding a delay could be potentially frustrating," Coleman said. …but Coleman also told me there's an option to increase the un-send time window to 10 seconds. "We may decide to add longer options," he said.

I’m guessing this will be a popular option with job hunters who forget to attach their resume, which has happened to your humble blog poster on more than one occasion.

Lest you drunk e-mailers out there think that Google has forsaken your “unsend” needs, Google’s proactive Mail Goggles feature released last year has you covered. From the Gmail Blog:

When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you're in the right state of mind?

By default, Mail Goggles is only active late night on the weekend as that is the time you're most likely to need it. Once enabled, you can adjust when it's active in the General settings. Both Mail Goggles and Undo Send can be activated by logging into Gmail, clicking on “Settings,” and selecting the “Labs” tab.

Turn it on and try it out. Send an ex a confession of love. Send your boss an expletive filled e-mail. Send that Nigerian prince your bank account info. (Really, don’t do that!)

Undo Send seems like such an obvious feature, it’s amazing it wasn’t available until now. Actually, it was. Old timers might remember that during the dinosaur dial-up days, AOL allowed users to delete unread messages they had sent to other AOL users.