Stefan Schmiedl wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Dec 2004 12:34:29 +0900,
> Jamis Buck <jamis_buck / byu.edu> wrote:
> 
>>Lyndon Samson wrote:
>>
>>>Ok, who missed out, I've got a couple left.
>>
>>Ok, I just can't stand it anymore. I'm not necessarily interested in an 
>>invite, but I'm dying to hear from those who have gmail accounts: what 
>>is it about gmail that you like so much? Or is it one of those things 
>>that you have to actually *try*, in order to understand, like dependency 
>>injection?
>>
> 
> 
> Warning: Rambling rant ahead.
> 
> My personal take is that they just wanted to make sure that
> *everybody* is keen on getting an account. Make it exclusive,
> by invitation only. Seeding it amongst the geekest of geeks,
> first generation invites went quickly. But seemingly invited
> users got their own share of invites.
> 
> Now it has become a practical test for the claim that every two people
> in the U.S. can build a chain of mutually known persons of maximum
> length 6. If that is true, how many invites per person would you need to
> reach saturation?
> 
> Make people sign up and store their information on your company disks? 
> Easy. Instead of crawling and begging them for their data, be a snob
> and make it a challenge for them. They will fall for it.
> 
> On my box I have gobs of gigabytes for email storage, no ads
> and a very fast interface via procmail, formail, mutt and grep.
> I will not entrust a company with a service I can provide just
> as good.  I will be the last one without a Google email address.

Phew. Okay. For a minute there I thought I must be the only one 
skeptical of the "gmail hype". :)

I, too, am quite happy with my existing email arrangement. That being 
the case, I suppose there is little (if any) reason for me to move to gmail.

Thanks to everyone that responded!

- Jamis

-- 
Jamis Buck
jgb3 / email.byu.edu
http://www.jamisbuck.org/jamis