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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?"
It pains me that I have a Google gmail account. And no invitions to sell. (I got it through blogger, who offers the accounts to those who have a certain post rate... if you have an even higher post rate than myself, you get two invitations... which my friend has, but refuses to give to me to sell.)
I can imagine that there will be a rush of registration when it goes out of beta. Unless the beta testers have already taken all the "cool" addresses, and only the "hotstudabc666" ones are left...
Clever signature text goes here.
You're paying for a good chance of getting your favorite username before it's taken.
The shareholder is always right.
gmail is brilliant. i have an account (free, thank you) and the advertisement are off to the side and are as easy to ignore as the google ads on millions of other web pages.
To answer your questions:
No.
Yes.
Please, just because it's on eBay doesn't mean it's worth buying. Some people out there really need to realize this fact.
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
I made about 3 posts in 2 months and I got one.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I can see why people would want a gmail account. Porn, warez, etc. It's a gig of webspace on google's infinitely fast gigabit backbone linkS.
Toss in an autoresponder (or a script which has a web interface, logs into gmail, and sends attachment to other email addresses, or even just other gmail addresses) and you have a great warez, porn, or whatever you want distribution system, WITHOUT the kind of clauses that come with buying webspace against certain content. (If they tried making you agree to that, their admitting to reading private email and that would piss alot of people off.)
I know people who pay alot more than the $50 most of these are paying and who pay it monthly for a gig of storage on a fast server.
Another possible use, offsite backups, get enough gmail accounts to hold your critical data backups. Have an automated script that encrypts the data then emails it to your gmail account.
Here is the bad flipside to all this though, whether google wipes these accounts or not it doesn't matter. What do you think google is going to do when it finds out people are paying $50 just for a beta account? What do you think the odds are going to be of us getting free gmail after this?
I've gotten not one but two messages to my Blogger-acquired Gmail account claiming to be astoundingly well-spoken, prodigy, under-15 "kids" who also claim to be starting web businesses. One of them says he's starting a web hosting business, and says he would be "honored" to have a Gmail account.
I'm not kidding!
Why the hell is everyone so hyped up to get one? Are these people who honestly want a cool web mail service earlt? Is it a status symbol? Are these people mostly spammers trying to get accounts in order to run experiments on their filters, so as to better be able to defeat them later? Are they spammers trying to get as many accounts as possible so they can automate the process of marking spam as not-junk to try to break Google's distributed Bayesian filter system?
I can't agree that Gmail is fast. I don't particularly like how it "loads" for seemingly ever. I havn't tried it in IE, but its slow on Firebird (or as it is called now Mozilla Spacesquid)
I do have to say that the little one button keyboard shortcuts are amazing. If only Gmail had the ability to download from another postbox.
--sig fault--
Yes, Google could in theory wipe out all the beta accounts to staert with a clean slate. But I can't immagine why they would want to do so in this case. Perhaps you are thinking of the way game companies like Blizzard handle beta programs for their multiplayer games. In that case, there is a competitive advantage to those who have had longer to build up their diablo characters, so beta accounts disappear in the interest of fairness. However, since email is not a game, the only point to wiping the beta users is if they want to seriously piss a bunch of people off, especially those who have been promised that they could save all their email on it until the end of time.
So, if you want that email address that badly, go ahead and buy it and give us poor folk something to roll our eyes at. On the other hand, this might violate google's gmail EULA, though I doubt anyone's taken the time to read through it all yet...
This is assuming google wont delete all the beta accounts when the testing is over ...
The combination of that and a whitelist for all your mailing lists (how many are you subscribed to for which spammers use the source address as well?), and everyone who sends you bill payments (come on, there can't be too many of those), might well be the best solution to spam I've heard yet. At least, I'd be willing to give it a try.
Methinks the grandparent is underrated at +3 ... now if only I hadn't wasted all my mod points ;p
"Why are you watching the washing machine?"
"I love entertainment, as long as it's clean"
Rather than just saying X number of similar mails...
How about X number of similar mails that other users have marked as spam. This should allow for rules to be developed over time using human decission factors yet still allow sharing of these rules to allow a more "automated" spam filetering service.
If Google is smart (and I think they can be) they will have a special mailing-list processing in place. Suppose they get 1000 people subscribed to, for instance, debian-devel; what would you like to store if you were Google? one or one thousand copies?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048