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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 hackers@gmail.com 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?"
there are currently over 190 Gmail invitations for sale on ebay. Link[ebay.com]
-- the only good thing the French ever did was two chicks at one time
There's like 4 pages of this stuffs. hackers@gmail.com is already at $200
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...
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.
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.
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: sclifford@gmail.com. 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.
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..
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
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
-tom
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
usernames have to be at least 6 chars, sorry :)
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.
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.
http://use.perl.org
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
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.
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