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Google announced a new Gmail feature in the lab called Sender Time Zone. Zoli is happy about it. But in my opinion, it is the dumbest move on Google's part and it has the potential to mess up the "privacy" of businesses. Let us say a business in Salt Lake City uses an outsourced tech support team in Bangalore. The team in India will use the email address of the company in Salt Lake City but they will also use their own local SMTP server for sending the mails. This SMTP server will be set to the local Indian Standard Time. Usually, these outsourced tech support companies offer services to clients from all over the world spread out in different timezones. It is not possible for the outsourced companies to use the Utah timezone for that particular client and this has the potential to create trouble for the company in Salt Lake City.

The clients of the Salt Lake City company, when they activate this feature from the labs, are going to see the timezone of the tech support guy and they will definitely question the Utah company about it. This is bound to create troubles for businesses outsourcing tech support to countries like India. If I wear my political hat, I may feel happy about it but this is really bad for businesses. I do agree that one could easily find the timezone from the header information. But, not every user knows how to do that. With this feature on, it is easy for even my grandma to know where the other person is when they sent the email to her. Well, there are ways to use a proxy and goof up this feature but this is not helping businesses, especially the smaller ones who rely on such outsourced support from India, at all. It is time for businesses to wake up to this Google induced reality.

On the lighter side, Google mentioned in their blog post that it will help you by not waking up your angry girlfriend.

Let's say your girlfriend sends you an angry email. It's mostly about how you behaved at the party last night and then left for a business trip without saying goodbye. You read it from the other side of the globe, jet-lagged after a 12 hour flight. You want to call and sort things out, but forget that it's now almost 3:00 am her time. After waking her up, things only get worse.

Well, there may be instances when we will wake up our angry girlfriends but this feature has the potential to start the anger of an already awake girlfriend/boyfriend .