[jrafter]

Do any of you with a gmail account have an educated guess when they will be available to the rest of us?

Thanks in advance!

[thePurpleGiant]

I don't know, but if you find one of the Gmail threads in the Lounge (do a search) you will find that MacNN members have too many invited to give away, so I'm sure you can easily grab an invite in there.

[mdc]

gmail seems to have stopped giving out invites, i have not gotten one in about 3 weeks.

i do not see anything wrong with gmail, the servers seem solid to me. i do not see any reason why it should be in beta for much longer. but that's my view, on google's side it could be crazy!

[thePurpleGiant]

Originally posted by mdc:
i do not see any reason why it should be in beta for much longer. but that's my view, on google's side it could be crazy!

Google Images seemed to be in beta for at least a year, Google News is still in beta, so I expect Gmail to be in beta for a while yet.

I have to respect it though, that they are prepared to keep what appears to us as a 'fully functioning' product in beta indefinitely until they have every single bug ironed out. This may become harder for them to do now they have gone public, since they will have pushy shareholders wanting results now, not in three years.

[madmacgames]

Originally posted by thePurpleGiant:
Google Images seemed to be in beta for at least a year, Google News is still in beta, so I expect Gmail to be in beta for a while yet.

exactly. And look at Froogle. It is also still in "beta" but has been quite functional for a long time now.

Google Catalogs and Google Local are in betas too.

Not to mention all the cool things that Google Labs is cooking up.

They've got alot on their plate to be done. The gmail will go public sooner or later.