Today is Sunday, July 06th, 2008

Gmail’s New “Custom Time” Feature Opens The Floodgates to Time Stamp Manipulation

Gmail Custom TimeYou’ve probably seen novelty programs like TimeMachiner that allow you to send emails into the future. But what about being able to send emails into the past? Better yet, what about being able to send emails to a recipient marked as read into the past? Gmail’s new beta “custom time” , which was released yesterday, lets you do just that. Kiss your trust in time stamps goodbye.

At some point, we’ve all had or witnessed (some form of) the following argument:

Person A: Why didn’t you do X? Dude, I sent you an email about that a week ago….
Person B: No you didn’t. I check my email 40 times a day. I would never miss something like that.
Person A: Check your email. Trust me. It’s there…

From now on, if you’re “Person A” in this argument, it’s entirely possible that you’ll rush to your inbox expecting validation and instead be surprised and embarrassed to find a “read” message from “Person B”. Of course, you’ve never actually read the message before, but there’s no way to prove that you didn’t. What do you do then?

I’ve always found comfort in the sanctity of time stamps. I trust and count on them, so just reading about this beta set me on fire. In regular Google fashion, they’ve made the functionality super easy to use, which makes it all the more terrifying.

The only saving grace, really, is that Gmail says it’ll limit users to just 10 pre-dated emails per year, siting that Google researchers have concluded that “allowing each person more than ten pre-dated emails per year would cause people to lose faith in the accuracy of time.” Maybe it’s just me, but it would only take ONE pre-dated email showing up in my inbox to render me faithless.Gmail Custom Time Testimonials

If you haven’t seen the testimonials on the Custom Time Beta description page, I wholeheartedly encourage you to take a quick gander over there. I’ve captured my favorites in a screenshot. Dude, I thought Google’s motto was “Don’t Be Evil“?

What do you think? Please comment freely.

April 1, 2008 | Filed Under Ethics, Technology 

comments

2 Responses to “Gmail’s New “Custom Time” Feature Opens The Floodgates to Time Stamp Manipulation”

  1. Fraser on April 1st, 2008

    Steffan, I think you should look at the calendar again ;)

    @Fraser - Way to comment 5 minutes after I posted! Sorry for not approving the comment until April 2. So the April fools Gmail Rant experiment wasn’t that great of a success. Bummer. Only 1 comment (other than yours) and a spike to 111 unique visitors - not exactly my best day. People were not fooled at all - in fact, I don’t even have any significant outgoing stats to the Gmail Custom Time page. People weren’t even curious. They knew about it, dismissed it and moved right on. I did get one additional subscriber and a twitter follower though. hahah. I’ll post the stats in an hour or so.

  2. Phillyboy on April 1st, 2008

    hahaha thats funny

Leave a Reply