After years of carrying “invitation only” tag, Gmail is finally ready to embrace all and sundry. Until now, Gmail, the email service from the search engine giant Google (News - Alert), set a new trend in the Internet world by offering almost unlimited amount of storage and displaying ads based on the content of the correspondence. But the Gmail service was available only by invitation. In other words, you could have a Gmail account only when someone who already had a Gmail account sent you an invitation to join Gmail.

 

Starting Wednesday, Google removed this “invitation only” restriction and made Gmail open for all. Now, access to Gmail is open in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Brazil. Google had already opened up this service last year in several other parts of the world such as Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Russia and Egypt. The company spokeswoman Courtney Hohne said that very soon, this “invitation only” restriction will be removed in North America, Asia and most parts of the South America. However, Gmail will retain it “Beta” tag for an unspecified duration, signifying that the company still considers its e-mail service to be in testing phase.

 

Although there was a craze for Gmail invitation in the initial years of its introduction, getting an invitation to open an account with Gmail was not a difficult process at all! Existing Gmail users could send out invitations to 100 people to join Gmail. Also, everyone who was willing to provide their cell phone numbers to Gmail also got an invitation. With other e-mail service providers such as rediffmail and Yahoo! offering similar storage capacities and services, the craze about Gmail had lessened in recent years.

 

But initially when Gmail debuted with much fanfare and hype, getting an invitation to join Gmail was on the list of every e-mail users’ to-do list. The hype was so much that some people with Gmail account were “offering” invitations for $100 at Ebay! Much of the hype about Gmail was because of the 1GB storage space it offered, which was simply unheard of at that time (2004). Other leading service providers like Yahoo! and Hotmail provided anywhere between 15–20 MB storage space. India based rediffmail was the first to react to the Gmail challenge by offering 1GB storage space to its users. Then, others like Yahoo followed suit.

 

Gmail, realizing that its USP is no longer safe, upped the ante and offered 2.5 GB space, with the promise of adding a little more space every day! But by that time, experts were questioning the security and privacy policy of Gmail since it scanned the e-mails to display relevant ads. In the current market, even though Gmail offers the highest storage space, it still lags behind its competitors in terms of the number of subscribers it has.

 

Of late, Gmail has run into many controversies regarding its name and usage. In UK, Gmail is called Google Mail because Google lost a court case with Independent International Investment Research on the name Gmail. This company had registered the trademark Gmail in UK when Google was still doing the research on its Web-based e-mail.

 

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