Recently Gmail introduced new feature titled as “Gmail Custom Time“, by which you can send a past dated e-mail to your friend or family members. So now, in case if you forgot to wish your grandma “Happy Birthday”, then you can just fool her by sending an e-mail, timed some 5-6 hours before.

Some Limits

• You will be able to send only 10 such custom time e-mails/year, as gmail team thinks that allowing more than 10 emails per year would lead loss of faith in accuracy of time.
• You can only send e-mail back until April 1 2004 only, the day when Gmail was launched.

Working Method

The feature works on Grandfather paradox method. According to Wikipedia,

The grandfather paradox is a paradox of time travel, first described by the science fiction writer René Barjavel in his 1943 book Le Voyageur Imprudent (The Imprudent Traveller).[1] The paradox is this: suppose a man traveled back in time and killed his biological grandfather before the latter met the traveller’s grandmother. As a result, one of the traveller’s parents (and by extension, the traveller himself) would never have been conceived. This would imply that he could not have travelled back in time after all, which in turn implies the grandfather would still be alive, and the traveller would have been conceived, allowing him to travel back in time and kill his grandfather. Thus each possibility seems to imply its own negation, a type of logical paradox.

Testimonials

Google have also listed the testimonials of their beta users.

One of the user “Robby” have expressed, the way he used “Custom Time” feature to win tickets to Radiohead show.

“I just got two tickets to Radiohead by being the ‘first’ to respond to a co-worker’s ‘first-come, first-serve’ email. Someone else had already won them, but I told everyone to check their inboxes again. Everyone sort of knows I used Custom Time on this one, but I’m denying it.”

While a epistemology professor, says that,

“This feature allows people to manipulate and mislead people with falsified time data. Time is a sacred truth that should never be tampered with.”

Anyways, every new thing have their own pros and cons, it depends on you, how you see it.

Special Thanks For Being Wictims of Google’s April Fool prank.