Gmail finally supports IMAP. I'm happy.
Now, when I read an email in Thunderbird, it gets marked as read in the web interface, so if I log into the Gmail web site I don't have a gajillion emails that are unread which I've actually already read.
Thank you Google.
I'm afraid I no longer have any invitations to give out. Thanks for your interest.
'm still getting people finding my site after searching Google for 'gmail invitation', mainly because I have an entry with that title and it seems to be ranked quite highly (on the first page of results). The entry was posted almost 18 months ago and at the time I just had the 1 invitation (though I've had many, many more since).
Since so many people are still finding that entry, and because I still had 100 invites left, last week I changed the entry to announce that I still had some spares. I'm now getting a slow but steady trickle of people emailing me for an invite.
If you're reading this and you want a Gmail invitation, email me and I'll try to get one to you as soon as I can. I still have lots left. All invitations gone now, sorry.
Gmail is 2 years old in just over 3 months time, incidentally, after being announced on 1st April 2004. And yet it's still in invitation-only beta.
The Gmail Invite Spooler is now defunct after Gmail's Product Manager asked for it to closed down, however, while it was still running I donated a number of invites to it. Originally when you sent an invite, you were supposed to add a first and last name, as well as the email address; however, with these invites going to the spooler these could be made up, so that's what I did.
Checking my Gmail address book today, I've found Bobby Davro, Dale Winton, David Beckham, Engelbert Humperdinck, Ford Prefect, Slarti Bartfast, Zaphod Beeblebrox, Sal Butamol and others in it.
No Arthur Dent, though. 49 invites still up for grabs if anyone wants one, by the way - just let me know your name and the email address you want it sending to.
The Gmail Invite Spooler now has over 1.5 million Gmail invites to give out. If you're after a Gmail invite I suggest you go there as you're pretty much guaranteed to get one. I still have 50 of my own to give out though.
It really can't be long now before Gmail starts accepting normal user registrations.
I have 3 Gmail invites up for grabs - if you want one, email nrturner at gmail.com with your first and last name.
All Gmail invites now gone, sorry. Check the comments for other sources of invites.
Gmail's been in beta now for over 8 months - surely it can't be long now before Google opens it up to the general unwashed masses.
All invites gone now.
If you run an email service, you know when you've become popular because some bonehead spammer launches a dictonary attack against you. And, alas, someone has done this against Gmail.
Mike's got 6 Gmail invites to give away. If you need one, head over there - don't post here! :)
Posting may be quite light this week as I've had a severe lack of free time - on Sunday, I turned up at 9am to go the airport and didn't arrive back on campus until 11:40pm, and yesterday I wasn't back until 8.
This is getting silly, but whatever. 4 more invitations to give away this time. Usual rules apply - leave your email address and first and last names, email me if you aren't happy with posting in the comments.
All invitations gone, sorry.
I have another 6 Gmail invites to give away. If you're interested, email me or post a comment and include your full name, not a nickname. Email me if you don't want to reveal your real name in public.
All gone now, sorry.
5 more invitations up for grabs. Drop a comment or an email to me with your email address and full name.
All invitations are now gone.
It's also Google's 6th birthday today! Happy Birthday Google, the internet is a much better place thanks to you :) .
I have another 6 invites for Gmail. If you want one, post in the comments, ensuring that you post your full name (ie a first name and surname) and your email address. I'll update this entry once all the accounts are gone.
All invitations are now gone.
I also now have a Gmail category, since I seem to talk about it so much. It'll take a bit of strain off the rather large Internet Things category which I tend to use as a dumping ground for anything Gmail-ish.
I have one Gmail invite that appeared today (Gmail users: the invite link is at the bottom-right corner now). The first person to email asking me for it gets it.
Update: It's gone. It went some time ago, actually, but I'm still at work and haven't really had time to update this. Sorry to everyone who emailed too late.
News.com has an article about Google's hurdles with applying for a trademark for 'Gmail', since at least three other organisations applied for trademarks before it did.
But here's the crunch factor. Google announced Gmail on April 1st, and went to register the trademark on April 7th. Now, between March 30th and April 7th, 3 other companies requested to register the same trademark. I'm no super-sleuth, but that sounds fishy to me.
I'm sure at least one of those companies tried to register the trademark before Google in the hope that they could get there first and could then sue Google for trademark infringement. Now, according to the article, the trademark office reviews applications sequentially - first come, first served - but hopefully they will take exception here and analyse the motives of these companies for registering the trademark. Google actually has a product available with this name, but it doesn't seem like the others do.
In any case, let's see what happens.
While watching the Czech Republic punnel Denmark into submission, I found some other projects which go by the name of 'Gmail' and pre-date Google's email service.
The first Gmail is an email client for the Gnome desktop environment that stores emails in a MySQL database. However, it's been a long time since the project was updated, although there is a Debian package for it.
Another Gmail is the email newsletter of the Grappenhall Cricket Club, who are located near Warrington in Cheshire. Probably not that interesting unless you live near there and want to know how the local team is doing.
There's a program for Windows called Gmail2 which lets you manage email lists. It's a shareware program.
A site called OldsGmail has information about Oldsmobile G-Body cars and is home to a mailing list on the topic.
Amazing what you can find on the internet if you look hard enough, isn't it? :)
This is quite cool - a Gmail notifier for Firefox. It sits on your toolbar and displays how many unread messages are in your Gmail inbox. There's a screenshot at Redemption in a Blog - it's not the prettiest thing in the world (yet) but it seems to work fine on my release candidate of Firefox 0.9.1. Clicking on the icon logs you into Gmail.
So far the RC of 0.9.1 is working fine, although the build I was using yesterday (built on Thursday) did suffer a couple of crashes. The final 0.9.1 should be out on Monday.
Finally, apologies for all the Mozilla-related posts lately, but there's a lot going on the world of 'zillaness.
I have yet more Gmail invites to give away. This time, just post below (with a valid email address) if you want one, first-come, first-served. Comments will be closed once they're all gone.
Update I: Well, that was quick. All gone in just over half an hour... :)
Update II: Jake's got 10 to give away if you missed out.
Congratulations to Simon Brunning, Bud Porter, Jess Martin, Elyne and Stevie K for their winning jokes. Gmail invitations are on the way to all of you.
For those who missed out, Quanta has two to give out, so head over there if you're interested in getting one. Or try eBay, they're now going for pennies at a time.
One final reminder about the GMail competition - I'll be picking 5 winners sometime tomorrow, so if you want an account, post your funniest joke as a comment (or by email to me). The 5 funniest, in my opinion, will all get Gmail invitations.
If you've already entered but have now got Gmail accounts, please let me know so that I can give the invitation to someone else.
Alrighty-then, I have 5 more invitations for that free email service that is provided by the world's biggest search engine. This time, I'm going to do a competition to win them.
Post in the comments below, or via email (neil @ this domain), your best joke. The 5 which I find funniest on Monday will receive invitations. How does that sound?
Note: Please don't post jokes that are very discriminatory or offensive. Anyone mentioning the two sharks joke will be disqualified.
Update: The competition is closed. Congratulations to all the winners.
Update: (24th Jan 2006) I have no more invitations left. Thanks for your interest.
Hanni dropped me a GMail invitation earlier in the week, and although I haven't really used my account, I now have an invitation of my own to hand out to someone. So, if you want one, be the first person to comment on this post. Make sure you include a real email address that I can actually contact you with, otherwise you won't get one.
While the BBC has been keeping up with the GMail saga on its website (including this article from yesterday), I didn't expect it to feature in a two-minute slot on this evening's 6 O'Clock News. For the unitiated, the BBC News at 6 O'Clock is arguably the BBC's main evening news program, and despite it being dumbed down somewhat in recent years it remains one of the most watched news programmes in Britain.
The slot is archived here - you'll need RealPlayer or something compatible to view it (Real Alternative hooked into Media Player Classic worked for me). It does come to a good conclusion though - if you don't like what Google is offering, go elsewhere; it's not like the free email market is saturated.
The thing that annoys me is that Yahoo is a portal that offers free email, and could quite possibly use cookies to link search results with emails, along with any of its other extensive online services, yet I don't see anyone get on their high horses about that. Think about it. I use Yahoo Messenger, have a Yahoo profile, and a (seldom used) Yahoo mail account. Throw in Yahoo Personals, Search, and My Yahoo, and you could probably get a pretty good picture of what I was like.
Of course, I don't use all of those. But what if I did?
According to Reuters (and many other sources), GMail really isn't an April Fools Joke. This year's joke was the jobs on the moon prank, whereas GMail is a legitimate service that is soon to launch.
It does sound interesting, although I have to admit I was one of those who thought it was a joke, mostly because it was like no other email system I've heard of and the press release seemed somewhat suspect. So, seeing as it is legitimate, what do I think?
While I probably won't use it myself (I already have, theoretically, 1GB of email storage), something like this is a very bold step for Google and could set an interesting precedent. It will certainly turn the heat up on Google's rivals and re-invigorate the webmail market.
But next time I hope they don't announce something like this on April Fool's Day.
