h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

RustlingElf - stand by your inbox, you're about to get an invite

Thank you very much. Now - what to choose for an email address? Let's suppose my name is Brian J. L. Sewell. (My previous address started with bjls3, so that string should be reasonably memorable, though it may not look it.) Which of these is the best?

[email protected]
[email protected] - starts late in the alphabet, apparently good protection against spam
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected] - type it!
[email protected] - too spammable/guessable
[email protected]

Any other ideas or principles for choosing an email address would be highly appreciated.

The theory is that you grab your own real name as you GMail address, on the basis that you can. (Obviously though if your real name is Sergey Brin or Larry Page you're a bit buggered on that score.)

The next step is to use one of the free invites that your new GMail account should (?) come with to set up a further account with a name that is familiar to you

Whichever of the above usernames you choose, you can bet it's already been trawled by spammers' robots since you just posted them all on a website

I'm not entirely sure that the spammer bots can get to the conversation threads. Or at least if they can, I don't think that it is very easy for them to do it. As I (poorly) understand it, it is something to do with the way that each page here is constructed - each page being a bespoke construction taken from chunks of the database.

A nice way to have your email is to have your initials separated by dots then your surname, eg [email protected] It looks fairly official, is easy to remember and is usually long enough to not be picked up by the random email generator machines. Plus by having 2 full stops it becomes less likely that it will be 'guessed' by spammers (or their computers).

Mel

Thanks for the tips everyone.

Gosho, that is not my real name.

If a spambot manages to determine the connection between "Brian Sewell" and the above addresses, and apply it to my own name, which it would somehow have to detect, then I will be impressed!

> The system is, if someone posts saying, "I want one". Those with invites
> to give post, "your invite is on its way". Then they send the invite.

I want one


Of course only if anyone still has or gets new invites.

I've got one! To the email address on your personal space (the 'Email' link)?

Rho

That should work, yes.

or even better to jp.lieberkind @ the same place

Sent!

Rho

Good work there, Rho

The last time I checked I was fresh out of invites.

And it works fine. Thanks, Rho!


And now I'll go home and not use it for at least two days!

I don't need an invite because I already have more MB of storage than I can use, between hotmail, yahoo and graffiti...

Just wanted to mention that the most hilarious thing I saw on that "Gmail is Too Creepy" page was the following:


This is for your copy-and-paste convenience:
Dear Gmail user: Due to privacy considerations, we cannot respond unless you resend your email from a different account. For more information, please visit www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com


How exactly are you supposed to send that message to someone who just emailed you from Gmail if you refuse to respond to mail from gmail?

Ok, I suppose you *could* compose a new email from scratch with that message instead of hitting reply, but still... if you don't want gmail to even know so much as your email address, it's gonna be kinda difficult to send that message to the person.

Is anyone else having problems with gmail today? I can get into one of my accounts with no problem, but not the other two. In Mozilla I just get a blank page, whereas in IE I get an error message saying 'Oops, the system was unable to etc, etc. Please try again in a few seconds' It's been like this all morning

Ok, now I'm getting the error message in Mozilla too. That's a step forward... I guess.

Ok, panic over - I just needed to clear a bunch of crap out of the PC

Thank Zarquon for Windows Washer

Three more GMail accounts are up for grabs. Same procedure as before if you want one