Gmail Addresses For Sale

challahc writes "For the low, low price of $199, you too can be one of the lucky testers of Googles new Gmail service. Just Ebay It! This CNet News story has the details." Bill Walsh adds "The account for [e-mail] is asking 200 dollars! Is it a good idea to buy anything that's in beta? Couldn't Google just wipe out all of the beta accounts when the service starts up?"

Ebay

[jacobhoupt]

there are currently over 190 Gmail invitations for sale on ebay. Link [ebay.com][ebay.com]

Whoa... that's a lot of accounts for sale

[tangent3]

There's like 4 pages [ebay.com] of this stuffs. [e-mail] [ebay.com] is already at $200

huh??

[gregfortune]

This is a third party sale through Ebay... Google is not involved with the sale of these addresses. At least take time to understand the post...

Re:Registering several addresses in the beta?

[spectral]

You get invited to beta test gmail. Each invitation gives you one account. If you use it enough, etc., you might get more invitations to give to other people (or yourself, I guess. Though technically that's against the TOS and illegal). So only one account/address, legitimately.

Re:Registering several addresses in the beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google employees get 50 invites -- those are the first tier of users. Those invited by Google employees (the second tier) get 2 invites each (at least that's how it was for me). The third tier cannot invite anyone at this time.

A bunch of unsold invites

[stefanlasiewski]

Well, [e-mail] may be "pretty", but as for other Gmail addresses, there are numerous Gmail invites which were never bid on at all [ebay.com], sold for a pitiful $5, etc.

gmail beta testing

[Sean Clifford]

I've been beta testing for a while. No, my account isn't for sale. Seems kinda cheesy and just about guaranteed to get shut down. Anyway, about gmail. I've found a lot of stuff to like about gmail and a lot of features missing.

Like: No spam. Not a single freaking message. Either they have an excellent filter or I haven't spread it around enough. Let's try an experiment: [e-mail] [mailto]. Guess that'll be a good test of their spam filter. Cringe.

Anyway, the interface is uncluttered - just the gmail logo and a "star" flag for important messages. Everything else is hyperlinks or dropdowns. It's simple and fast.

But as a web application developer, I'm underwhelmed so far.

I think a simple icons-w/text-based GUI is easier to work with and not terribly bandwidth intensive. Anyway, there's no way to import my contacts yet, or my address book, or a PST file (or other mail format), or import mail from another service (that's stretching).

Anyway, while I think it's crass to sell your gmail account (and probably isn't kosher), doubly so for those who buy one. It's free, people - get a blogger account and make your own. Caveat emptor - it ain't worth $199.

Re:This is pathetic

[linzeal]

Um, I like gmail's web interface enough to say that I have not used another email interface since a week ago except to periodically check for important messages on other accounts that do not allow forwarding, yet..

Re:gmail beta testing

[jacoplane]

Opening a blogger account won't get you a gmail account. I've had a blogger account for about 2 years but I hardly used it. After I heard they were giving away gmail accounts to blogger users I immediately checked the site but to no avail, I guess they didnt consider me active enough. I've even been blogging there a bit over the past two weeks to see if maybe I'd get the chance to sign up, but so far I've had no luck :(

Re:Whoa... that's a lot of accounts for sale

[Anonymous Coward]

What have you been smoking? hackers [ebay.com] is not already at $200. That's the minimum price and nobody has bid on it yet. Moron!

Re:Account wiping

[Anonymous Coward]

Google doesn't do sucky things?
Have you read the terms of service [osdn.com] for Gmail? This kind of policy seems to be the norm when it comes to the darling of the search engine business.
Check your computer for a cookie from Google. Yes, I know most will condemn me as a tin-foil hat wearing chicken little but Google does keep a database of all your searches using the unique identifying key in that cookie.
Catering to the usual crowd of Slashdot who hate Microsoft, Google has implemented one of the policies [theregister.co.uk] that Microsoft amended after a public outcry to them.
Heck Sergey Brin refused to deny that Google is willing and able to hand over the search histories of individuals to law enforcement agencies when they request it. Given the broad sweep of the Office of Homeland Security in terms of the ease of gaining subpoenas for investigating supposed acts of terror, I've found myself being very careful what I search for on Google.

Re:Registering several addresses in the beta?

[cheesy9999]

FYI, in response to your sig, GMail will be supporting Safari, although I'm not sure about Opera. Check out the MacCentral interview with Sergey Brin [macworld.com]

Google's response to ebay sales

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been testing Gmail for a while now. There are still quite a few bugs and issues that need to be resolved. But the single most important reason to get gmail account is their spam filters. I use spamassassin+thunderbird junk control for my spam filter. But gmail leaves the combo in dust.

Btw, this is the response from Google to EBay sales:
-----
Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004 16:25:07 -0700
From: "Gmail Team" Add to Address Book
To: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [#9562759] GMAIL on Ebay !

Hello xxxxxxxxxxxxxx,

Thank you for your interest in Gmail.

Unfortunately, the popularity of Gmail has led some people to try and profit from selling invites to sign up for a Gmail account. Google is in no way associated with and does not approve of people auctioning or selling Gmail invitations. Consequently, Google cannot validate the authenticity of any Gmail invitations except those distributed via official channels.

If you purchased a Gmail account invitation through an online auction site, such as eBay, we suggest filing a complaint against the seller with the site's user protection services. We look forward to announcing a wider release of Gmail in the future, and do not encourage those interested
in Gmail to purchase an account through an online auction.

Sincerely,

The Gmail Team

Re:Looking for...

[PhrostyMcByte]

usernames have to be at least 6 chars, sorry :)

Re:Whoa... that's a lot of accounts for sale

[Soko]

Ahem. Imagine, if you will, this option setting for you GMail account:

If more than
[ ] 100
[ ] 500
[ ] 1000
[ ] 2000
other GMail users have recieved an e-mail with the same content as your Matching content threshold, treat it as SPAM.

Hmmm... Random words at the start of a SPAM message? OK:

Matching content threshold is the precentage of an e-mail that matches the content of e-mail that is sent to other users. Select your matching content threshold :
[ ] 95%
[ ] 90%
[ ] 80%
[ ] 70%

Lastly, with this option:

SPAM should be
[ ] Deleted
[ ] Flagged

cheap spamming would be nigh impossible. Google's search tech is certainly capable of doing this. Off hand, I can't see much that spammers can do to circumvent it, either.

Soko

I have a gmail account

[mackermacker]

Someone whos brother works for google sent me an invite. I've had a chance to play around with it, and to be honest, I think it will be a big hit. For an online pop account, it's set up in a very nice way. Instead of the default normal inbox (new messages coming in are placed above the older ones, good has only the names of the people you have received messages from, and then all additional messages to and from that same person are put under their own thread, wityh an easy to use feature for archiving threads. It also says if the mail was sent from someone else to you, or sent from you to someone else. Theres a lot of other features, such as staring someone, but havent quite gotten that far yet. And yes, you get 1GB of storage. All in all, affter using the interface, I dont think I will go back to using other free email accounts.

Re:Registering several addresses in the beta?

[coolsoldier]

Contract Violation.

Contractual law actually is law, just very difficult to enforce in most cases.

Re:Account wiping

[coolsoldier]

Plus auctioning beta software is against eBay's TOS. http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/items-ov.html

Re:You do realize

[Murdock037]

If [e-mail] has used his address for anything confidential and is erased, eric-else comes and register [e-mail] and gets this guys personal information. ...

Preface: My name is Eric.

I was given the opportunity to get a beta test account, so I naturally tried "[e-mail]."

No go-- the system told me it wouldn't allow any user names less than six letters.

So I can guarantee your story will never happen exactly as you describe it.

Re:paying for free mail?

[notque]

The nicest thing about my gmail account is the way messages are handled. Every email is like a forum post.

It is very ackward to get used to, but once you do it is very nice.

Re:This is pathetic

[notque]

This is the best webmail account I've ever owned. It has spell check, it's mail function saves each message in full. You recieve and send mail as part of a thread of messages. You can search through those messages easily.

You can put a special tag on messages that are important.

It auto completes addresses you've used before. It's spam function I half want to see in use, and half don't. :)

Gmail doesn't allow EXE attachments

[MilenCent]

That may not work -- few people have noticed it yet, but Gmail doesn't let you send or receive Windows executable attachments, according to them not even whe zipped!

- John Harris

this is untrue.

[rebelcool]

I have a friend who invited me who is not a google employee. By your logic, he would, at the most, be 2nd tier and I would be 3rd. However, I can invite people.

I had to use the service for a week before I could invite anyone.

Re:Registering several addresses in the beta?

[Rysith]

You can also ask for more invites (Someone I know asked for and got 100 invites to let everyone in a project that they were working on get an @gmail.com address), so somebody somewhere can grant invites.

Re:Smart

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's like most MMORPG games. People pour months of time and effort into the beta test and once it goes public, bye bye account. You shouldn't rely on a beta for anything important.

Re:This is pathetic

[ptudor]

You could just pay my company $240 annually for email with your own domain and one hundred accounts. That's a better purchase in the two-hundred-dollar range, imho.

And to be on topic, I guess the article only demonstrates that some impatient people also have money they don't need to spend wisely.

Re:OT:Slashdot = News.com + 2 days... or more

[nuba]

I believe they set this up but put it on another domain. Kuro5hin or something...

Re:Gmail doesn't allow EXE attachments

[MilenCent]

Yeah, but if someone really wanted to they could recognize EXEs from the beginning of their data, they all contain a fairly similar header. I don't know if Gmail looks inside attachments as part of its search and ad service functionality, but if they do it seems likely they could tie into that to catch executables.

The AC respondent is right however, in that a simple XOR could make it quite a bit harder for Google to detect EXEs. Certainly not insurmountable, mind you, but harder. More expensive computationally.

Re:Myway.com email is better

[dmehus]

The compose message function in My Way sucks ass, actually. If you bold something, it makes the rest of the text after it bold on the receiver's end. The whole system they use for composing messages is flawed. It's hard to describe, though.

And My Way survives by the Google advertisements. Its owner, Interactive Search Holdings, was recently acquired by Ask Jeeves. ISH also owns Excite and iWon, and in fact, I predict that Ask Jeeves will model Excite and iWon after My Way by removing all pop-up ads network wide.

Cheers,
Doug

[e-mail]

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, someone has a sense of humor. The address [e-mail] is up for sale at eBay... A beautifful opportunity to kiss privacy good-bye :D link [ebay.com]