While I haven’t actually sat down and read all the responses to my last post yet, I can tell you that there are more new messages in my inbox than I have Gmail invitations, and none of them have to do with Viagra or refinancing my home. (Sadly.) So I guess this means that you should only beg for a Gmail invitation now if you think you’re fundamentally worthier than all of the other people who have already asked for one, or at least worthier than all but five of them.

A couple of people also wrote to ask if I actually use my Gmail account, and surprisingly enough the answer is yes. It has actually sort of become my “real” inbox, because most of the stuff that is sent to my my other address is from mailing lists or people I don’t know. That’s not to say I don’t read it (I do, even if I’m bad about replying in anything resembling a timely manner) but it’s sort of nice to have somewhere else that friends and family can reach me.

Gmail is still in beta, and it’s missing things like IMAP support and the ability to save drafts, but as far as webmail goes I think it pretty much can’t be beat. The ads don’t bother me at all, and neither does the idea of the Googlebot scanning my mail. If you think the mail sent to your other webmail addresses is private in any meaningful sense of the word, you have bigger worries than targeted text ads.