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Google drops invites for GMail

Published on 15th February 2007 by Brett Thomas

If you have no friends who care enough to invite you to GMail, well...now you don't need them.

Google's GMail has been a great service to many of us. In case you've been living under a rock since 2004, the free email service offers over 2.5Gb of storage and a wealth of actually useful online features. For many of you, I'm preaching to the choir - but for those of you who don't have a single friend in the world, you may still be out in the cold. Well, antisocials rejoice - GMail no longer requires an invite.

Apparently, the "Invite a friend" service disappeared sometime earlier this month, but most of us are just now catching up on it and saying "Ooh, yeah, that IS missing!" You can now register for an address directly on the main login page, meaning anyone and his brother could now get a 2.5Gb GMail account.

The move illustrates a raised confidence by Google to be able to supply the storage demands that it wants to provide. This has always been a big reason for the invite system, but it appears to be fixed now. What isn't detailed is whether this new open-enrollment system will begin bringing more spam to and from GMail accounts. The invite only allowed you to bring ten friends to the party, so now signing up tonnes of bogus email addresses could be possible. So will finding which ones are already taken.

Is it nice to lose the velvet rope at GMail? Or is there a bit of a potential to let the real riff-raff in inadvertantly now? Tell us your thoughts in our forums.

22 Comments

Discuss in the forums Reply

Mother-Goose 15th February 2007, 14:07

I kinda liked the elist idea of being part of gmail and looking down on hotmail users, that said, the more the better, it has to be the best web based e-mail service out there

geek1017 15th February 2007, 14:12

My Gmail still has the invite box thingy.
94 left apparently.

I don't really know if this is big news or not.
Maybe it'll allow more spamers or something, but the 'invite' system and the ubiquitous 'Beta' that Google uses for everything should both be dropped.
No matter what improvements there can be made, it is still pretty much a finished product.

Now we just need to see if the number of Gmail accounts actually goes up appreciably.

Veles 15th February 2007, 14:14

I've been under a rock :(

quack 15th February 2007, 14:17

The invites will probably stay, you just don't need one to sign up.

Gmail boxes are 2.8GB by the way, not 2.5GB :)

scifi3018 15th February 2007, 14:51

Like geek1017, i still have the invites box, and odly enough i also have 94 invites left...

I already have about 3-4 gmail accounts linked together so i can send and recieve from all of them. Its a great service, and im glad tosee it going public (if it is).

And quack, its 2.817GB (and constantly growing) :)

unrealhippie 15th February 2007, 14:56

I like the word 'beta' written on it. Most people I know are 'betaphobic' and for apsolutely no intelligent reason. Has to be said, GMail is the best web based email interface I have used; simple, uncluttered, easy...

Bindibadgi 15th February 2007, 15:07

FFS: Now everyone is gonna just sign up for accounts to spam people. A Gmail address did kind of hold some water, but not anymore since everyone will soon abuse it.

webbyman 15th February 2007, 15:35

I noticed this a few days ago and I was a bit shocked, as I thought I was rather behind on it all :)

randosome 15th February 2007, 18:32

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
FFS: Now everyone is gonna just sign up for accounts to spam people. A Gmail address did kind of hold some water, but not anymore since everyone will soon abuse it.

QFT

although i do have like 98 invites left, so really i could make 98 spam accounts ....

jezmck 15th February 2007, 18:47

Quote:

The invite only allowed you to bring ten friends to the party

I believe it actually peaked at 100 each.

Brooxy 16th February 2007, 01:47

Would I be massivly outnumbered if I said I didn't like gmail all that much...unless there has been changes to it in the last six months to make it tidyer and more efficent, then i'll stick with my hotmail account for msn / random stuff and my yahoo account for personal emailing...

supermonkey 16th February 2007, 04:12

I, too, must have been living under a rock all these years. I've heard so many people raving about gmail, but I've never understood why. What does gmail offer that my current ISP's e-mail doesn't have?

-monkey

Soulmage 16th February 2007, 05:07

Quote:

Originally Posted by supermonkey
I, too, must have been living under a rock all these years. I've heard so many people raving about gmail, but I've never understood why. What does gmail offer that my current ISP's e-mail doesn't have?

-monkey

2.8GB email box? Far as i know, all ISP mail boxes are 10-100Mb

SinxarKnights 16th February 2007, 07:05

I used to be a big Yahoo! fan due to the POP3 access that no other free email service could provide (except some ISPs, but don't you hate the hassle of changing an ISP with an email that you actually use?). After Yahoo! started charging for that, I just stopped using any webbased email. I guess it was sometime in mid 2006 that I FINALLY got a gmail invite. I guess until Gmail starts charging for basic features I will stick with it.

Djpuk 16th February 2007, 09:24

I never used Gmail after I read that they store all of your traffic, search through it and aggregate what you are emailing people about for the benifit of their advertisers, it just seemed a bit snoopy to me.
But I guess it is the same with all public webmail client providers (probably all ISP's), I only really use the webmail on our exchange server at work and steer clear of the public ones unless I absolutely have to, am I really missing that much?

<A88> 16th February 2007, 15:35

I think GoogleMail offers a great service and is very nice to use, but I stick with my Hotmail account because I rely heavily on Windows Live services, such as on my PDA and Messenger, so don't have a need to switch.

<A88>

Firehed 16th February 2007, 17:30

Quote:

Originally Posted by randosome
QFT

although i do have like 98 invites left, so really i could make 98 spam accounts ....

And then a hundred more from each of those.

I am a huge fan of gmail. I only use it for POP downloading (IMAP would be nice!), but I've grown to love how it still keeps a copy in the 'all messages' folder after its downloaded so I can still access my downloaded messages from another computer, not to mention search them.

jezmck 17th February 2007, 07:39

Quote:

Originally Posted by Djpuk
I never used Gmail after I read that they store all of your traffic, search through it and aggregate what you are emailing people about for the benifit of their advertisers...

The system looks for keywords in your emails and show relevant adverts. Therefore benefiting the advertiser (targeted advertising) and potentially you.

brumster 18th February 2007, 12:37

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mother-Gooser
I kinda liked the elist idea of being part of gmail and looking down on hotmail users

well at least we early adopters get to lord it over the new @googlemail.com users with our now unavailable (thanks to infringement) @gmail.com addresses

supermonkey 19th February 2007, 00:41

Quote:

Originally Posted by Soulmage
2.8GB email box? Far as i know, all ISP mail boxes are 10-100Mb

I suppose that's a good feature if you store/receive a lot of (big) e-mail. I can't think that I'd ever use that amount of space.

For what it's worth, the second most basic AT&T DSL internet account offers 11 e-mail addresses, each with 2GB storage. That's the ISP I use and in the 2+ years I've had the account, I've only received 2 spam messages.

-monkey

randosome 19th February 2007, 03:06

it depends on your ISP to how much space you get, since Google introduced 1gb many increased their 10-20 limit to 100, and now alot of them are at 1gb or more from the ones ive seen

However, i use outlook so the emails are stored on my computer anyway, and i don't really know how you could even use 1gb of space (let alone 2.8) unless you were constantly sending large files around and not deleting them

Also it seems most email providers still limit you to like 10mb max size for attachments

Lian Li Lover 19th February 2007, 09:23

Quote:

well at least we early adopters get to lord it over the new @googlemail.com users with our now unavailable (thanks to infringement) @gmail.com addresses

Not quite. My friend did a test with this cos he has an @googlemail account and it still works if you type @gmail.com when sending email to him