Gmail in the News

roadies writes "Despite all the negativity and privacy concerns that surround Gmail, it has still gained cult-like status where net-d0rks feel self validated by having a gmail address and will do anything to get one. Services like the Gmail Machine, a randomized Gmail lotto that has people hitting refresh until they get carpel-tunnel in the index finger, reports over 7 million pageviews (though, definitely not uniques) in 3 days and 55 invites given away. They just added 222 more through donators who have given up invites in exchange for a text link on the high-traffic site. GmailSwap (covered recently on /.) has given away everything from cameras to good vibes. Good news for hardpressed geeks: The invites are becoming more and more available and mainstream. Ebay once had gmail invites going for a couple hundred dollars. Now, nobody is bidding on them anymore, so you can purchase one the old-fashioned eBay way for a dollar or two." Reader marklyon writes "Third party developers have stepped in with utilities that enhance and improve GMail. One utility, Mbox & Maildir to Gmail Loader allows users to upload their existing email to their GMail account. Another, POP Goes the GMail, offers the ability to access your GMail account with any POP mail reader, giving users the ability to permanently archive messages. GTray lives in your taskbar and alerts you to incoming messages. Other, more general programs, allow you to forward your Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail messages to your new GMail account. The question that remains, however, is whether Google will work with or against third party developers in GMail's future."

My experiences with Gmail invitations

I got a gmail account relatively early (early in April) from a friend at Google. I use it mostly for mailing lists, not quite ready to put all my personal mail on it, especially when until this article I had no idea how to download Gmail for use when disconnected.

Initially I got a couple of invitations I could give away, every couple of weeks, and it was easy to find close friends to give them to. Then I found I had seven invitations this week and had run out of obvious candidates. I tried gmailswap, but the interesting ones (like a pound of Kona coffee) went too quickly, and the others were uninteresting to me. So I sent a note to my orkut friends, and quickly had well over a dozen requests for accounts despite including a disclaimer pointing to gmail-is-too-creepy.com [gmail-is-too-creepy.com] :). I gave away the ones I had, and surprisingly got a few more the very next day. I still have a queue of about 5 people I owe accounts to.

PS. This was a really, really nice Slashdot article, with a treasure trove of gmail information. Well done.

Re:My experiences with Gmail invitations

And this thread is how some spammer out there just received a high-quality, targetted list of addresses. Ironic, no?

-M5B

Re:My experiences with Gmail invitations

That gmail-is-creepy site is run by the dude who also runs the equally paranoid and whacked-out http://www.google-watch.org site.

See Google-Watch Watch [google-watch-watch.org] for details on the creepy paranoid dude and then go back and read his rantings with a large-ass grain of salt.

For those who still think email is secure I got news for you: Your email is already exposed in plain text on just about any server it is sent to. If your email is ever relayed through a third party server (and a lot of mail is) then chances are an unscrupulous admin has already read your messages or at least stored a copy.

What GMail does by comparison is relatively tame. The adds are inserted at display time. All email is parsed to more effectively block spam. No human will ever read your email.

Don't take my word or the word of some kook with issues.

Read the Gmail privacy policy [google.com]

EXCERPT BELOW:

Email contents and usage. The contents of your Gmail account also are stored and maintained on Google servers in order to provide the service. Google's computers process the information in your email for various purposes, including formatting and displaying the information to you, delivering targeted related information (such as advertisements and related links), preventing unsolicited bulk email (spam), backing up your email, and other purposes relating to offering you Gmail. Because we keep back-up copies of data for the purposes of recovery from errors or system failure, residual copies of email may remain on our systems for some time, even after you have deleted messages from your mailbox or after the termination of your account. Google employees do not access the content of any mailboxes unless you specifically request them to do so (for example, if you are having technical difficulties accessing your account) or if required by law, to maintain our system, or to protect Google or the public.

Donate Gmail invitations to troops

As suggested over at Wil Wheaton's blog [wilwheaton.net], 1 gig of space is a perfect amount for troops to recieve/send videos and other keep-in-touch files that other web accounts can't handle.

From the entry [wilwheaton.net]:

Help spread the word about this effort, and keep checking back

here [wilwheaton.net] for a link to the soon-to-be-built clearinghouse for requests.

A worthy cause, I should think. Currently, I believe people are just looking over at gmailswap for service men and women to donate their invites to, until this 'clearinghouse' is created.

I thought some slashdotters might be willing to participate.

Re:My experiences with Gmail invitations

... and quickly had well over a dozen requests for accounts despite including a disclaimer pointing to gmail-is-too-creepy.com :)

I too am a Gmail beta user, and I've been very pleased with the service. Setup my .forward file to send a copy to my Gmail box, and set my reply-to address to be my private email, and I'm all set. Now I can switch between Gmail and Mail.app on my Powerbook lickety split.

I wanted to bring up something else that I just came across that was kind of strange. I agree that the people freaking out over adwords is a little over the top, but I found this article [hackinthebox.org] that brings up a very interesting point:

"Moreover, like any e-mail provider, the text of your Gmail is stored and subject to subpoena. I can envision a situation where an advertiser, paying Google hundreds of thousands of dollars, claims that Google failed to "insert" its ads in relevant e-mails, or inserted a competitor's ads instead (or in addition to, or more prominently). In the course of the ensuing litigation, wouldn't both the ads themselves and the text of the messages into which they were inserted be relevant, and therefore discoverable? I can't imagine why not."

I generally believe Google is a good company, but this argument actually got me thinking.

Re:My experiences with Gmail invitations

I highly doubt that. (IANAL, though).

First, I'm fairly certain that YOUR privacy ranks WAY higher than any company's supposed "right" to a profit.

Secondly, the only way the advetiser would find out is by setting up a mail account of their own, and then sending mail to themself, trying to find out wether or not it's working. They could then easily save copies of the web-views, and use those.

Thirdly, such a lawsuit would be a civil matter, and I doubt that you can just get a judge to sign over a subpoena to go searching though million of people's mail. This relates to point number one.

This is of course dependent on the legal system, and we've all seen that they're very keen on protecting our rights, right?

Re:My experiences with Gmail invitations

IANAL either, but...

First, I'm fairly certain that YOUR privacy ranks WAY higher than any company's supposed "right" to a profit.

This is simply not the case. When you agree to the terms of Google Mail, it specifically says that your email will be provided to any court if they are given a subpoena. Right to privacy be damned; if a court issues a subpoena, Google will pony up the data, rather than be found in contempt of court.

Thirdly, such a lawsuit would be a civil matter, and I doubt that you can just get a judge to sign over a subpoena to go searching though million of people's mail. This relates to point number one.

Yes, you can. In a civil matter, discovery allows both the plaintiff and defendant to subpoena corporate data and documents that apply to the case. If the case involved a dispute over adwords, the subpoena might very well include "the contents of all messages that triggered the customer's ads to appear." Google would have no choice but to comply.

For an example of this, look at the SCO vs. IBM case. This is a civil matter as well, and both SCO and IBM have been subpoenaing millions of documents and source code and probably emails from each other as well.

Having said all of that, I don't want you to think I'm paranoid or anything. I use Gmail every day now, and I don't really care if they read my email or not. The reason why is because email is going in plaintext over the wire every day and Carnivore is probably already reading everything I send and receive anyway. Who cares about Google reading my email? I'm much more worried about the FBI reading it and building a profile on me.

Obligatory Gmail whoring.

Come on now, if you're going to grovel, be creative!

There was a man without gmail
Whose VAC could tell quite the tale
his wife worked real hard
to stack the punch cards
but she died, and now he's in jail

One gig, two gigs or three
Gmail's the right size for me
Don't be upset
I read the usenet
all archived, from 1903

My Friendster, and his big gut
has been reclusive somewhat
Gmail requests
he won't address
I think that he moved to orkut

I could be rich, without a doubt
I found an unbeatable route
this Nigerian guy
wants a reply
but I can't with my inbox maxed out

My mailbox will always O flow
inflators, fellators, you know
I get lots of spam
Thanks to my mam
That woman named me Info

Anyone have a spare invite for a clever guy?
[e-mail]

Waning excitement

it has still gained cult-like status

OK, I was one of the sheeple who used to go a few times weekly to the gmail website [google.com] to check things out.

But I awoke earlier this week [slashdot.org] to my Yahoo premium account suddenly offering two, not one, gigabytes of email storage... and all without the (overblown) privacy concerns and advertising. *And* I only pay $19.95/yr. for it.

I'm not (or at least don't need to be) interested in Gmail anymore. I've moved on and Yahoo has succeeded in taking the wind out of Gmail's sails, at least for me.

Re:Waning excitement

GMail offers 1GB for free, compared to 2GB for $20/yr. Maybe $20/yr isn't too much, but I think the free model still has some juice left. Not to mention the nice threading model and top-notch searching.

Re:Waning excitement

Yeah but my FREE yahoo account has 100MB storage, more than the account that I get (pay for) with my cable modem subscription. 100MB of email is really more than I need for personal use.

'Cause no one else is scanning your e-mail

Man, I love it when people start whining about a computer searching their e-mail. So i guess yahoo dosen't have a spam filter then? What, hotmail has to parse the text of every e-mail before it determines that that message about penis extensions is spam. How do you think e-mail programs work out that not every mail saying 'Hey, haven't talked to you in a while' is spam
G-mail's problem is not that it scans your e-mail, but rather that the good people are honest and upfront with what they are doing.
I'm sure people would all be thrilled about a virus check if it was billed as 'automatic file parser.' Sure, it might seem weird having a conversation about your favorite jewish actor and getting an add for 'learn hebrew in 24 hours' but that's only because google is utilising what everyone else has. And their only crime was the niavety that people would find this useful. Had they said 'magic pixies work out what you want and sudgest how to get it, while you browse your e-mail,' the tinfoil hate wearing community would embrace it (after all, fairies can't get through tinfoil!).
G-mail is a wonderful, not only because of the unprecedented amoutn of free space, but because of it's intuative and innovative features that help you organise your e-mail while still having that sexy, clean, not 'all up in yo' face' look google is so good for.
If i had to chooose between microsoft and google, i pick the one who vows to 'do no evil' and, so far, has done nothing to make me think otherwise

Re:I'm lost

What's so big about Gmail, anyway? Is it the gigabyte of storage? The allure of using something offered by Google? The excitement of being admitted to a semi-exclusive online club?

Perhaps all three, but I think after using Gmail for a couple of months, the idea that I can quickly search the full content of everything I've received is nice; the threaded conversations are really cool; and the sharp user interface is pretty nice.

On the other hand, the filter model doesn't cut it for me. Tagging things with a label but leaving them in an "inbox" makes it hard to find the good stuff. Maybe if I could "star" incoming messages based on criteria as well?

Problem Solved

...You can "star" incoming messages based on criteria. Edit a filter. "Star It" is one of the filter options.

Problem solved?

Re:I'm lost

Personally I love the following:

1) It's webmail like the ORIGINAL hotmail before MS tookover. Few ads, non popups, just gets you to your business

2) Google search for your e-mail, nice and fast. Beats the hell outta Eurora and Outlook searching

3) Threaded e-mails. I sent out an e-mail to a group of 10 friends, they all responded, I responded to some, etc. It all gets stored in ONE thread.

I thought about bidding on an account...

But instead bought an old 1 GB harddrive on eBay for 50 cents.

Still policy blocked from work...

Got the invite, love the interface, can't view it from work.

Still hanging on to my shell account.

Re:Still policy blocked from work...

Hmmm. Try https://gmail.google.com

The filters at my office don't handle https! So it works well that way.

As always, your mileage may vary.

Yahoo has retaliated

Yahoo now offers 100 mb to all free accounts, and 2 gigabytes to premium accounts. I love competition.

I got an account a few days ago

And if it's offered to the likes of me, it can't bt that cool. (I was a very brief user of Adwords.)

My impression: It's nice webmail. That's it.

I don't see the huge hype, but then again I did click on that invite link, didn't I?

I did it before, and I'll do it again

I've you'd like a Gmail account, send me an email at [e-mail] [mailto] and as I get invites I'll hook you up. I've hooked up 18 people this week alone.

What I noticed was that as soon as Yahoo announced they were upping their email limit, Gmail started letting me invite about 5 people a day.

Understand that I already have a backlog of 10 slashdotters waiting for accounts, but I labeled them all and as the invites trickle in, I'll pass them on...my friends and family and irc buddies are already hooked up.

Cheers!

Start Your Betting!

I've you'd like a Gmail account, send me an email at [e-mail] and as I get invites I'll hook you up. I've hooked up 18 people this week alone.

Slashdot vs. a 1 Gig Inbox: Who Will Win?

The Logical Next Step

.. would be Google Messenger.
Use Gmail address as a login ID, use it to capture the business IM and email market

Re:The Logical Next Step

Many think that the fact that it reads your email in order to provide targeted ads is disturbing.

Imagine Google IM, it would read your conversations as you were having them in order to send you targeted ads. Now that is creepy.

The GMail Market

One thing I noticed about GMail was that it was, at least for a short time, a small commercial market within itself. The market ebbed and flowed depending on if invites had become availble that day or not. Originally, there were few accounts, and I managed to snatch one up thanks to my Blogger account - while it lasted, my invites were gold. Before the market "crashed" a few weeks ago, I managed to get unlimited virtual hosting and some nude pictures from a college CS girl who wanted one for "geek cool". My, it was great.

Of course, then the market crashed. So now GMail Swap and others are worthless. But I've been using my invites for another purpose now - I currently have 30 GMail addresses to my name, including some interesting ones. I figure, although the rarity may not exist in having an account, the rarity could exist in having the account you want. Commercialism rises again.

Multiple accounts violate the Gmail TOS...

I think it's worth pointing out that having more than one Gmail account is currently against the Gmail's terms of service.

From the Gmail Help Center:

Can I have multiple accounts?

While we test Gmail, we're gathering information and feedback from a
diverse group of users to polish our product. As stated in the Gmail
Program Policies, a Gmail user is allowed to open one Gmail account.

Each invitation link is valid for creating only one account. With
1,000 megabytes of storage per account, we hope you'll have enough
room to store all necessary messages and information.

If you would like to read more of our policies, please
visit: http://www.google.com/gmail/help/program_policies. html.

Thank you for your helping us improve Gmail.

So, unless you've covered your tracks very well, don't expect to hold onto those accounts. I know of at least one case where a user who made more than one account had all his accounts shut down.

Gmail is currently in beta. Use of that beta is a priviledge, not a right, so abusing it is the quickest way to find yourself locked out.

Re:The GMail Market

...I managed to get unlimited virtual hosting...

Are you sure about that? Your site [zenwhen.com] has a big ass "This Account Has Been Suspended" page on it. :)

--ajay

The real success of Gmail

The success of Gmail is not the amount of space. That's called a gimmick. The success of Gmail is its searchability.

In the long run, having a gig of mail is pointless if you can't find what you're looking for. Assume you can have all the space in the world and you didn't delete a single email. How will you find the email sent sometime ago that you can't remember from a girl you can't remember who conversed with you on craigslist [craigslist.org] but you did remember her fantasy about being your naughty bukkake star?

You can't! Not without search.

Re:creepy

Every single email you send anywhere on the internet is read in it's entirety by at least one machine not in your control. That machine can trivilaly copy and archive the contents of your message and leave NO TRACE.

If you're paranoid about GMail, but you're happy to send unencrypted email to other addresses, then you're an idiot, that's all there is to say.

Donate those invites!

Wil Wheaton [clevernickname] is working on a project to donate Gmail invites to soldiers serving overseas who all have Hotmail which sucks. Go to his weblog entry [wilwheaton.net] for the skinny.

Reply-to Feature Tops My List

What I like most about Gmail is its ability to have a 'reply-to' option in the setup screen. I was using a cranky old IMAP account on my web hosting provider which was proving to be a nuisance (and I had far from a gig of storage!).

Since I am a Treo user, I still valued having the ability to check my account from my phone. But I also really liked the Gmail interface when I was at my desktop. So here's what I did:

I was pleased to see that Google allows you to override the reply-to address, so I immediately changed that to my current email address.

I then deleted my IMAP account and set up a mail forwarding alias that directs any incoming messages to my Gmail account as well as a pop account on the hosting provider's server.

I use the POP account to check mail from my Treo, and it also gets picked up by my Outlook client for permanent archiving.

The best part is I was able to switch my email exclusively to Gmail without anyone noticing the switch. This is top notch stuff.. Google has done something extraordinary here.

When?

When it will be out of beta? when it will allow non-invite subscriptions? When they will consider "its ready"?

They are making their webmail a playfield like is the domain name ownership one, and if it last months a to have really big webmail mailboxes, ligth webpages, intelligent spam/virus filtering and threaded mail view will be so common than when it will be finally out could be no news.

I even wonder if in the open source webmail market not exist already one that provides a good part of what gmail will give who knows when.

At this moment i would open the registration in gmail, not by invitation, but at will, still leave there the "beta" mark to show that still could be rough edges, but to accaparate the market before is too late. What if i.e. the actual Teoma [teoma.com] come out around the same time google started? still google would be the #1?

Well, anyway, i could be wrong, not tested yet so i can't say how hard or easy could be duplicated with advantages, but so far for non-users is almost vapourware.

PGP Anyone

If you're really paranoid, just PGP your messages. Granted there's no direct plugin I know of yet, but I'm sure it's about to come. Then again there's always c&p into your email.

The propensity for unencrypted emails to be read and intercepted has existed on the net, but people just ignored the possibility or figured the probability of it happening them is low.

If it bothers you there's an indefinate log of your email, encrypt it--So what if google shows you nothing by PGP ads on the right side of your screen ?

Gmail Maching Brutally Raped ;)

Slashdotting a site which encourages users to repeatedly hit refresh?

A new low, or were they just asking for it? ;)

If you would like to be invited

Please send me an email to coderman at peertech.org with your first and last name, and email address (this is for the form).

I will reply with your current position in the queue of people wanting an invite, and when I get more invitations (currently 5 every one to three days) I'll send you one.

All I ask is this:
1. Please tell me if you get invited before your turn in queue, otherwise I will waste an invitation.
2. Please don't sell this invite, or sell the invites you subsequently get from your own account.

People who sell or extort for invites lack integrity and are selfish. Don't be that kind of person.

Okay, so when's the GMail middleman getting here?

One of the links in the main story has *another* link to gmail-is-too-creepy.com. One of the things that page mentions is that many people (aside from not wanting a GMail account for themselves) are electing to never *send* mail to GMail, for fear that it will get permanently archived forever.

So, I guess it's inevitable that someone's going to make a site that lets you send to GMail while avoiding it. Imagine checking your GMail and getting a message saying:

You have received a piece of mail which the sender does not want archived by the GMail servers. Click Here to read it...

which would be a link to a web page which held the message for, say, two weeks. The service could be set up as a mail relayer, of sorts, where it would be easy to reply to GMail people. For example, the site could be, say, notgmail.com. Then, when replying to someone at GMail, you just add "not" to the address and the service would handle saving your message (only for two weeks, remember) and sending the real Gmail recipient the notice that they've got mail waiting.

I'm surprised that something like this isn't here already. Just imagine GMail's archives getting flooded with "You have received....".

What is google gaining from your personal life?

Google owns Orkut [orkut.com], Blogger.com [blogger.com], the largest search engine on the 'net, and is now offering free, high quality web-based email accounts with a gig of storage. Except for a few lone voices [f2o.org], I haven't seen any serious discussion about why this huge corporation is spending so much resources on providing these services for free.

The advertising revenue couldn't possibly amount to a significant fraction of the costs involved with these services. The value must lie in the personal information that people are donating to Google, Inc.. What are their plans for it? They obviously plan to datamine it - but how will and how can it be used? What new knowledge can be generated by correlating and cross-referencing your orkut, blogger, gmail and google search information?

It is troublesome that it seems to be popular and hip to be totally unconcerned about privacy [pgpi.org]. Attitudes like "we have none anyways" seem to prevail, and its funny to criticize those who voice some concern as tinfoil-hat-black-helicopter-seeing schitzos. It looks like people have forgotten that privacy matters [privcom.gc.ca]. Like many other companies [microsoft.com] that try to collect personal information, Google's privacy policy [google.com] is subject to change at any time. This makes it almost meaningless! It is effectively the same as saying, "We respect your privacy right at this moment, so have complete trust in us. Tomorrow we might change our minds."

Re:What is google gaining from your personal life?

Read their SEC filings, then tell me they're not making any money on ads. There's also no shortage of "serious discussion" about the perceived harms of Google - if you've never seen GoogleWatch then you haven't been looking too hard.

The complaints are garbage. Same old "oh no their cookie doesn't expire til 2038" bullshit. No idea why you people target Google when every other website shows ads too, has the same privacy policy, and has the same expiration date on their cookies. I guess you just like to be contrarian.

MP3 Player for GMail Account

I have a few GMail invites laying around and would like to trade one of them for an MP3 player. Doesn't have to be an IPod but just one with decent storage space and easy to use. Email me if interested.

Anthony

GMail Invites: I've got a bunch

hey all, i keep getting new invites on a fairly regular basis, if you just head-on over to my blog [blogspot.com], find the "GMail Invites" post and add a comment with some info as to why u want a gmail account and a valid email address (feel free to use creative obfuscation to protect yourselves from spam crawler bots).

I can't guarantee you an invite but your chances should be pretty good. I'll favor in that order (mostly), people who have a blog on blogger.com, people who have at least bothered to register with blogger.com to place comments, people I've marked as /. friends, people who've marked me as their friend, unless i change my mind :)

Google Social Networking

Google is giving out GMail invites like candy at the moment, you can get anywhere from 3-10 invites every other day or so (at least I do). Of course every invite you use is recorded, since it adds the inviters address to the invitees contact list automatically. With this by-invitation-only strategy they've managed to drum up an amazing amount of hype and discussion on blogs, mailing lists and message boards all over the net. Of course it also helps that GMail, in it's true Google-like fashion, is pretty damn good. That means there's a high demand for it, it's the latest in-thing and you don't want to be left out.

So, with everyone inviting their friends, who in turn invite their friends and so on, Google is sitting on a gold-mine that would make any data-miner drool. They've probably got the biggest social networking dataset ever compiled right now. I'm just thankful it's Google and not Hotmail or Yahoo. As someone else already said, the 1GB storage is just a gimmick, it's the Google brand that matters.

Gmailmachine results

I wrote a 2 minute script (perl and wget are our friends) and let it run overnight. Their server started out really speedy, then started getting laggy so I shortened wget's timeout to 60 seconds (900 seconds? please :)

During this run the chances went from 30,000:1 to 50,000:1 to 100,000:1 :)

Results ... over approximately 10 hours the script iterated just under 30,000 times before getting an invite, which averaged out 50 hits per minute for me. If you assume most of the heavy hitters had a similar script (maybe, maybe not) running for the same time period where the server got 20,000,000 hits, that means 666 scripters ;)

NOTE: I made my script relatively friendly ... only 1 process at a time, it gave the server a minute to respond, and it slept for 1 second between requests. No forked processes, no running as fast as it can. Did I defeat the "feel" of the process, sure, but someone had to be expecting it because there was nothing in the HTML that made this at all difficult. This means I would guess I could have gotten closer to 1 hit per second if I'd -tried- but there didn't seem like much point.

I want to give a HEARTY congratulations for having a server with a dynamic page that took the load like a champ. No images had to help, but it was still pumping out >5K per request at 550-600 requests per second. Not an amazing feat technically, just good planning, but appreciated. I was quite surprised to see it had made it through the night (my invite came @ 8:30am, almost exactly when I woke to the thought of "hey, wonder if I got an invite?", maybe I accidentally invoked Telepathy::Broadcast).

And before someone goes "why did you waste your time for a freakin Gmail account", I spent 5 * the time needed to write the script to write this post ... it is /. where my behavior is unexplainable :)

Little late but... I wrote a program for GMail

For those of you who are interested. It's called G-Mailto.

It is really simple. It associates mailto: html links with GMail. So when you see a link like this on the web:

[e-mail] [mailto]

You can click it and have the GMail compose window open up instead of something like Outlook Express that doesn't work with GMail. If you are not logged in to GMail it will bring you to the login screen and then redirect you to the Compose Page.

I'm using it right now on my Windows XP machine and it works perfectly. Supposedly works fine on Win9x/ME as well.

It's free, open-source, comes with an installer/uninstaller, and you can always switch back and forth between using it from your control panel. Under Internet Options > Programs Tab > Email. After you install G-Mailto, it will be in that list along with any other mail program you use.

Anyway, if you're interested, I put it up on my site:
http://www.rabidsquirrel.net/G-Mailto [rabidsquirrel.net]

Re:Well...

ohhhhh me!

send it to: Mekkab @ gmail DOT com.

Oh, Wait...

Getting Invited

How does one get invited. I crave the invitation. I am almost tempted to start my own Google just so I could then invite myself to gmail.

----
Is Your Boss A Muppet? [blogspot.com]

Re:Getting Invited

"How does one get invited. I crave the invitation. I am almost tempted to start my own Google just so I could then invite myself to gmail.
"

If you have been using Blogger for a while then you probably already have an invitation. Sign on to blogger (as if to update your blog) and look carefully over on the right.