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?"

paying for free mail?

[chaos421]

there's a sucker born every minute. gmail sounds pretty neat, however i'm willing to wait for the public opening. some people i'd see spending $200 for one of these accounts... yahoo/netscape/microsoft employees associated with their respective free mail... if they get in and see what it looks like, they can get ready to add countering features to their sites faster.

I got one for free

[Anonymous Coward]

Afterall people it's a free service. Why are people so bent over for Google?

Smart

[AstrumPreliator]

Pay a crap load of money for a beta account for a service that will be free sooner or later anyway. What are you gaining from getting this beta account? Bragging rights? Thats a hefty price for bragging rights.

This is pathetic

[MysticalMatt517]

This is pathetic... I like google just as much as the next guy, but at the end of the day it's just e-mail. Before I'd fork over $200 for an e-mail address I'd register my own domain and create a tricked out one of my own.

To whom are invitations?

[Talence]

I do wonder though: does google allow the transferring (with or without accompanied transfer of money) of accounts at all or are they awarded on a per-person basis? In fact, the same account could be shared by a variety of people.

Ridiculous

[MistaE]

I don't mean to sound troll or anything, but I just think this is getting really ridiculous. I mean, it's an email account to a beta service that hasn't even entered into official use yet. Also, another thing that peeves me are these damn squatters that (apparently) seem to just take accounts with (cool?) names that other folks might want and then sell them off. It's the same damn thing as domain squatting. Its nice that folks are trying to earn a living on the internet, but at least do it with something legit, not just shit like this.

But then again, if people really do pay that much money for a damn name, then there's not much one can do about it. It just sounds kind of stupid to me.

Account wiping

[lorcha]

Couldn't Google just wipe out all of the beta accounts when the service starts up?

Not likely. Google doesn't tend to do sucky things, and wiping out someone's legitimate email account, even if the thing is in beta, would really suck. How can you test the service without giving out your address, and if their users are actually using the accounts, I don't see how they could feel justified in deleting them.

Re:Smart

[SphericalCrusher]

Some people just have to know what it's like if they did not get in themselves. Curiosity, mainly. After all, some people have money to spare...

Re:Smart

[spectral]

you get the name you want before anyone else does.

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

[ixplodestuff8]

Chances are it's already on dozens of spam lists, since it was posted on slashdot, ebay, and countless other sites.

$200 for a spam account!

Spam

[madenosine]

It's too bad this e-mail address is most likely going to get spammed like crazy...

Isn't it time...

[Malfourmed]

... google had its own slashdot section?

I got one on Ebay using "Buy It Now" for $19.99

[hwsquaredcubed]

I see all of the posts about "why would anyone pay for a free email account?", etc. I got mine about 5 minutes after that CNET story first hit on Friday. I immediately went to Ebay and searched for "gmail." After several screen refreshes, a "Buy It Now" listing for $19.99 popped up. I snapped it up immediately. Why? Even though my name is not that common, someone already has it registered on Hotmail and Yahoo. So I have to add numbers, etc., to my name and I have never liked that. It was worth $20 for me to get my own name at Gmail.com. The question about couldn't Google wipe out the Gmail accounts when it's out of beta is ridiculous. The first people they gave Gmail accounts to were Google employees and "friends of the company." Why would they piss those people off by canceling the beta accounts and making them then compete for usernames with the rest of the unwashed masses? They could, but they won't. Finally, if you have used Gmail, it is a damn good email service. There are few tweaks they need to make - the contacts management functions lags far behind Yahoo and Hotmail, for example, and, to my knowledge, there is no way to have desktop email alerts such as you get with Yahoo Messenger or Microsoft IM - but there is no question that they will fix these. Flame on, but I think that Gmail will ultimately surpass Yahoo and Hotmail for web-based email.

Re:Smart

[LostCluster]

Not to mention... Google could very easily just kill any auctioned-off account.

I'd pay for it...

[man_ls]

I'd pay for a fully featured gmail account...that'd be the perfect way for me to abstract my email from my ISP and dynamic-hosted-domains by letting me store on a reputable provider.

I'm going to be leaving for college soon...my email address probably won't be coming with me, because I won't be on that ISP any more.

You do realize

[DaLiNKz]

They wont wipe.. I mean how could they? 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.. Yeah, you shouldn't use something thats for testing for anything important, but no less..

Re:CNN?

[Rufus211]

I guess they noticed my post and it's fixed now. I guess they do read the comments.

Re:This is pathetic

[dalutong]

I actually like their interface. I hope they GPL it so I can use it on my own site.

I was very impressed. Simple, clean. happy.

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

[LostCluster]

I've been accepted once on only 11 attempts so far. Slashdot must get more "acceptable" stories than they can actually accept, so I take it some degree of semi-randomness (who gets the editors' attention in the sea of noise first) will always be a final factor...

Re:Gmail beggers

[eggboard]

I have the idea that WaReZ folks are going to get several Gmail accounts, fill them with WaReZ, and widely distribute the passwords for these various accounts so that people can connect and download them.

Gigabytes for free = untraceable free WaReZ.

Re:Registering several addresses in the beta?

[DAldredge]

While it may be against the gmail TOS, how is it illegal? IOW, what laws are they breaking?

Re:I got one on Ebay using "Buy It Now" for $19.99

[Have Blue]

Google could easily put a no-resale or no-transfer clause into the license agreement, and yank the account on those grounds. It would also be an easy argument to make that anyone who receives this gift from an appreciative Google and then turns around and hocks it on Ebay doesn't deserve to be in an exclusive beta anyway (and they're free to sign up later with everyone else when it goes public).

I bet those employees are in the beta already

[DrewMIT]

Weren't all "active" blogger users invited into the beta? Something tells me the odds that maybe one or two employees from Yah, AOL (nescape, who?), or MSFT just might have slipped through the cracks that way.

Re:I got one on Ebay using "Buy It Now" for $19.99

[user no. 590291]

How would they know which were sold?

Re:Gmail isn't bad

[GoClick]

@google.com would be a brand liability The problem of @gmail.com is people can easily mistake people for saying @email.com on bad phone lines, over a crowd or even if the person has bad cursive writing.

mod parent up

[gad_zuki!]

Google does do "sucky things," just like any other company and now with the enormous data-mining potential it has and the current political climate it may get more "sucky" in the future.

Yes, Google isn't Diebold or SCO, but that's not saying much.

Reminds me, time to delete my google cookies on various browsers. Thanks anonymous coward!

Re:This is pathetic

[anything901]

The $200 is likely a premium, not just a price. They don't want millions of random people rushing to "test out"(read: use) their Beta product, so they charge a substantial fee. Should the user come across a problem or bug, he is much more likely to tell Google about it, since he paid $200 dollars for the account.

Google: Obscurity + Stanford Policy != Security

[edgedmurasame]

This is what you get when the staff's doing it the Stanford way, thanks to Orkut. Orkut started the whole "invite and hype" model with the service of same name, and continues this policy today under Gmail. If anything, it'd do good to come clean before people who have enough clout to force it to happen, no matter what your euphemism [orkut.com] or excuse [google.com] is, given your common denominator [stanford.edu]. Obviously, they need to read up on true security, versus putting the backbone of things on close circles that are easily broken when people start bragging about them. Refer to Operation Fastlink, something that would definitely clean house out of Orkut, and Google if applied to them. If you are going to run a private service, dont advertise.

Sure

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't Google just wipe out all of the beta accounts when the service starts up?

Sure. But by then you got your money. Who cares if you rip some poor sucker off? It's the American way, man! It's what makes this country great!

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

[1u3hr]

If more than
[ ] 100
[ ] 500
[ ] 1000
[ ] 2000
other GMail users have recieved an e-mail with the same content...

Too many false positives. There are such things as mailing lists, not to mention various automated alerts for bill payment, etc that you do want to receive, and which might vary only in a few details from thousands of others sent simultaneously -- with the obfuscation standard in spam you can't just look for identical messages.

Re:Smart

[LocoSpitz]

That would be a great idea. Delete everyone's emails... get rid of the account they've been giving to friends for months... I can't think of a reason they wouldn't do it!

Re:Gmail beggers

[Ieshan]

Oh, for the love of shit.

Google can just lock the number of IPs that can access an account in X amount of time.

Say, 1 every minute, or 5 every 20 minutes.

This would have NO effect on 100% of the customer base and shut down the "transmit stuff using google as the warez site" option, since Warez works around "swarming".

Re:Slashdot = News.com + 2 days

[notque]

I have an account, you cannot use anything less than six charcters.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Slashdot = News.com + 2 days

[huchida]

I never thought of Slashdot as a source of breaking news. On the contrary, a lag between the story becoming common knowledge and opening it up for discussion gives us more research time to one-up each other.

Google and Privacy/Security

[karmatic]

While I wouldn't want anything that's really private on this account, I wouldn't want it on hotmail either. I'd either use encryption over existing free services (less tracability) or just use my own mailserver.

Things like credit card numbers, bank data, passwords etc. will be perfectly safe, even if the data is scanned. Google are smart enough not to have the publicity problems they would get if they revealed any private info, and it's not really as if anyone cares what my email says. They are scanned for advertising purposes, they are not proof read to see if anything interesting is happening in my life. I feel safe because I know Google won't do anything with my financail details because they have PR people who know that would cripple their service uptake and I know they couldn't care less about my personal life.

Having said that, for me and I'm sure plenty of other slashdotters it's a moot point - I have my own mailserver which I can check on my home machine via thunderbird, my phone via the built in GPRS mail client and from anywhere else with a browser via squirrelmail. 10GB storage, no attachment limits and unlimited addresses I can check from anywhere - it's easily worth what I pay for it.

Lawyers...

[rice_burners_suck]

I think it would be really awesome if some idiots pay thousands upon thousands of dollars for some cool email addresses, and when Gmail goes live for real, everything is reset and someone else gets that address for free. That would just be so awesome. I'd really like if it did happen just to see all the lawsuits that would arise from it. Well, did I mention I'm a lawyer?