Asterix & Obelix (c) René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo

want Gmail? the only way to get it is to be invited. how? go and make friends. lots of friends. these very nice people -- samantha, mr. z, josef, a.r., and sean (sweet, sweet sean) -- sent me invites! in turn, i was able to give an invite each to my loved ones.

Gmail is an experiment in a new kind of webmail, built on the idea that you should never have to delete mail and you should always be able to find the message you want. Gmail is a free, search-based webmail service that includes 1,000 megabytes (1 gigabyte) of storage. The backbone of Gmail is a powerful Google search engine that quickly finds any message an account owner has ever sent or received. That means there's no need to file messages in order to find them again. When Gmail displays an email, it automatically shows all the replies to that email as well, so users can view a message in the context of a conversation. There are no pop-ups or untargeted banner ads in Gmail, which places relevant text ads and links to related web pages adjacent to email messages.