Category: Google

I’ve got a few invitations for Gmail. If anyone is interested, leave a comment.

I noticed the other day that I have 5 more gmail invitations to give away. Instead of holding a contest I am going to give them to friends that would like them. So if you mentioned to me recently that you are looking for an invitation, or if you never mentioned it but now realize how good gmail is, please let me know.

Hotmail and Yahoo are sending Gmail invitations to the trash. I’m wondering how many of my invites are actually making it to their destination because I have many unanswered invitations out there.

There is a way around it though. If an invitation you have sent is diverted by the Hotmail Spam Gods, then you can go into your Gmail Sent folder and forward the message back to the recipient. I just wish there was a way to view all of the “unanswered” invitations so I could either resend them, or send them to someone that is actually interested in having Gmail.

It’s another new round of Gmail invites. This time I have a total of 5 accounts to give out. The contest ends Thursday night at Midnight 10pm MST (I’m excited to give these away and don’t want to wait until Friday) with prizes to be awarded on Friday Thursday night or Friday morning.

There are a few relatively easy things you have to do in order to win a Gmail invite from me. You don’t have to do them all, but the more of them you do, the more points you get, and the people with the most points get invites.

#1 – Post a comment explaining that you would like a free Gmail account and why you think I should give it to you. (Worth between 1-25 points at my discretion)

#2 – Include your first and last name in the comment. I’m no longer going to make up first and last names for people I am sending the accounts to. Also it’s manditory to include your current email address. If you want you can include the word “at” for “@” or the word nospam, which (don’t worry) I am smart enough to figure out and send the invite to the right address.

(Worth 200 points)

#3 – Be a Blogger account holder at the time you post your comment. (Worth 15 points)

#4 – Have a blog. (Worth 5 points)

#5 – Post a link on your blog to my blog. Permanent sidebar links are worth more. You may get double points on this if you post a link in addition to having a permanent link.

(Single posts are worth 20, Permanent links 50, up to a total of 70 points!)

#6 – Compose a limerick about me, my site, things I’m interested in, or Gmail. (10 – 50 points)

The person with the most points who posts before 12:00pm10:00pm MST(as recorded in the comments) will get the first invite, and the person with the second highest score will get the next one and so on until I am out of account invites.

Update June 17, 2004: The contest is now closed. Please try again next time. I haven’t added up the scores but I will do that shortly and have the results in my next post.

I’ve given away all of this round’s Gmail invites. This time I only had 3 people post comments so I gave all 3 accounts to them. Don’t worry if you are just learning about my contest now, there will be another one as soon as I get some more invites. It’s also more like begging than a contest — so it’s not that hard. Also you could continue to beg in the comments of this post because I know for a fact that Anna-Maria and a few other of my friends have invites and most likely no one to give them too – it’s a shame when invites go to waste. They read this site often, so you could try. No guarantees of course. Oh and in the future all posts asking for Gmail accounts must include a first and last name.

Update June 16, 2004: Actually the next round of Jeff Milner’s Gmail Account Giveaway will be more like a contest than begging. Though begging helps. Just to give you a taste of things to come – having a blog helps, and it’s going to involve poetry.

As I stated in an earlier post, I’m going to continue to give out gmail accounts to those interested parties that comment with reasons why they deserve the account. Don’t be shy, even crappy reasoning can win you a Gmail account. Also please note that last time I had more demand than accounts, but instead of going back and just giving them the accounts, they are free to post again and be re-entered into my contest.

Just as I was preparing to hand out a bunch of Gmail accounts to the random people posting comments asking for them, I found I could no longer log into Gmail on this computer. Anna’s tablet PC let me log right in, but I could only get as far as the loading page on this computer.

Being the computer technician that I used to be (I used to work at a computer store) I figured that the problem had to be software and that it was a scripting problem, in addition to the page just saying “loading…” there was that handy dandy broken script icon at the bottom of the page. So I went to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer page and reinstalled my copy of IE 6.

Miraculously I can now log back into Gmail, and I will be awarding the free accounts today. I expect that next time I have free accounts to give out more people will comment on why they deserve it – and I’ll happily give them out again!

Anna and I each have 3 gmail invitations. I don’t know who to give mine to. I have perused the gmailswap.com pages, I’d still rather give it to someone I know — or at least someone who asked me specifically. I know my Dad and brother also have gmail accounts and for sure my dad does not have anyone to give his 3 invites to. I think the way Google is going about letting the users decide who gets to join is the coolest thing ever. Please leave your comments below with a return address and an explanation as to why I should give you a Gmail invitation.

When I signed up for my Gmail account, it mentioned that the special invitation would only be on blogger.com for a month. This leads me to believe that it will be at least another month until they open it up to the public. Perhaps June 1st, or maybe they are shooting for an American holiday – like the 4th of July? As far as the dates go though, it’s all speculation on my part. They likely haven’t announced a date yet because they are still doing tests. I have noticed a couple of glitches, but they seem to be intermittent and not that critical.

Oh if you have any questions about Gmail that you’d like answered, feel free to ask in the comments. I’ll do my best to answer them.

Here is something about Gmail you may not have known:

Gmail has the ability to search for your mail based on the following criteria: From, To, Subject, folder, Has the words, Doesn’t have, Has Attachment, and Date (within 1 day to 1 year – you set the term).

I noticed that addresses I emailed are automatically added to my contact book. I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand it makes keeping track of any email addresses a snap, but on the other hand I feel like I just gave Google a copy of all my friends and family’s email addresses. (Sorry). I can only justify it by telling myself that it was inevitable anyway, because eventually someone somewhere was going to email them from a Gmail account, besides all the people I emailed were already on my hotmail contacts so its not like one more list is really going to hurt, these contact lists that users create for services like hotmail and yahoo mail haven’t been abused in the past – that I’m aware of anyway, so let’s just hope Google continues the trend.

I do like the fact that when I go to retype an email address that is in my contacts, Gmail brings up the closest spelling match as I type (the same way autocomplete works in your browser). This system is superior though, in that in brings up not just entries that start with same letters you have already typed, but the entries that start with the same letters you have already typed in the order that you email most frequently. It’s complicated but I’ll let Google’s help page explain:

As you prepare to send a message by typing in an email address, Gmail’s auto-completion feature suggests names from your Contacts list based on the letters you type. Keystrokes can add up, and this will save you a few seconds every time you send a message. Gmail orders your auto-complete list by frequency so that the addresses you send messages to most frequently appear at the top of your list. If you would like to view a list of your most frequently mailed contacts, click ‘Contacts’ at the top of any Gmail page, then click ‘Frequently Mailed.’