Google drops invites for GMail

Author: Brett Thomas
Published: 15th February 2007

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.