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Gmail Goes Public
An anonymous reader writes "Google has apparently given the green light for Google's e-mail (Gmail) to be open to the general public." From the registration page: "As we make room for more Gmail users, we want to first extend invitations to Google users. We're still working to make Gmail better, so for now, we're just inviting a small number at random. Looks like that's you! We're really excited to share Gmail with you and we hope you like it." Observed at the P-I Buzzworthy Blog as well.
everybody already has an account.
Everyone who wants one anyway.
Some of the people I invited promptly followed my lead and abandoned their six or seven hotmail (and ISP-based) email addresses and had everything useful forward to Gmail.
Others made an account and check it from time to time.
The bigger group is the last one: The people who really don't care (either through lack of understanding or sheer apathy) about Gmail's advantages.
These days I can't give away an account, because I've sent them to all my group 1 and 2 friends already. The only ones left are the "Why should i switch from Yahoo/Hotmail/Webmail?" crowd
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
There are actually valid reasons for some of us to not use gmail for general-purpose emailing.
d y that you seem to be thinking it is.
Aside from the obvious privacy issues -- any company who has its people put company information on another company's systems is a little nuts -- there's also the power and flexibility of running your own MUA/MTA pair.
For example, I've got my own wildcard domain -- anything at this domain goes to me. In addition, my MUA (mutt) is configured to automatically make my replies come from the address to which the email had been sent. I consider this useful to me, and a way to give out specific addresses so as to see how spam ends up getting to me.
gmail actually takes a step in that direction -- they let you use '+' notation (eg 'user+whatever@gmail.com'), but they don't do the next step -- making it so you can automatically respond as 'user+whatever' to emails sent to 'user+whatever'.
And, frankly, it's just _faster_ for me to use my own CLI MUA to go through a bunch of emails, and more convenient and familiar.
On the flip side, my dad recently decided he finally wanted to get an email account, so I created a new domain for him and had all mail sent to this domain forwarded to an account I set up for him at gmail. So he'll be using gmail for mail. I really do like gmail -- I use it for some specialized purposes -- but it's not the one-size-fits-all-so-everyone-should-use-it-alrea
Everyone in gmail has 50 invites left. They currently replenish your used invites daily. I've handed out a few gmail accounts in the past few weeks and my number of invites continues to peg at 50.
As a result, gmail was effectively completely open quite a while ago.
You, of course, are speaking only for yourself. :-) I run my own mail and Gmail is still very useful for me, most notably for the very effective search. I have procmail bouncing a copy of inbound mail to gmail that I can access on the road if I am not using my laptop to ssh in my own server (I am not running Squirrelmail or Imp, etc.). I also like sending all my list mail to my gmail account which for me makes it easy to read. I like the 'conversation' method of threading for lists. A year later and I am currently at 29% capacity.