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That's not entirely a waste, it would have given you a better chance for an email address you wanted.

Yeah. I ended up with an eight letter @gmail.com because I dithered, but if I'd signed up by any means necessary when I'd first heard of it, I would've gotten a four letter one.

I bartered on gmailswap.com, sending someone a bicentennial 50¢ US coin in exchange for an invite.

The envelope made it to the recipient, but the coin fell out in transit because I was young and had no idea how to mail coinage. They graciously gave me the invite anyway.

Ah, to be young and clueless about coinage mailing.

Yielding a priceless anecdote

Nothing to be ashamed of. I think I might have bought a Google Wave invite a couple of years later :/

Well they did promise unlimited space - remember how it kept growing? I guess until it didn't...

But still, compared to Hotmail etc the free storage space (something like 1GB vs 10MB) was well worth $6

shrug It probably gave you months of fun.