Anyone with even a teaspoonful of tech savviness has by now heard about Gmail, which is the new web-based email service offered by the site that has been single-handedly responsible for the most lookups and searches in the history of the Internet: alt.sex. No, it’s from Google of course…you know, the guys whose technology we can all thank for the fact that when we do a web search for, say, pizza, we get a page that includes advertisements for local pizza places, pizza recipe books, and even Red Lobster, which does not have pizza but does have deep pockets in its Advertising budget.

While there’s generally nothing too exciting about email anymore, the lure of Gmail lies mainly in its generous storage capacity. You get one whole gigabyte, which—unlike other webmail services—is enough for an entire day’s worth of penis enlargement spam plus any real mail you may have been sent. Additionally, Google’s very own ad software trawls each and every one of your messages for keywords, so that they can offer you unintrusive, relevant text-based ads for penis enlargement within your penis enlargement spam.

(Actually, Gmail does offer a robust spam filter, which means that hateful spam email will become a thing of the past for the next five days until someone figures out a way around it.)

These exciting promises have naturally stirred up a flurry of interest in Gmail, but what’s made it into a true flavor-of-the-month is that the service is still in “beta” and that new accounts are “by invitation only”: you can’t just go to their site and sign up for an account, you have to be invited to sign up by someone who already has a Gmail account. So, Gmail accounts are “rare” and highly prized right now by those who seek to try the service out and secure themselves an appealing account name, like “charlieq@gmail.com” rather than “charlieq793758325071209356@gmail.com”.

The liberal use of quotation marks above was on purpose, because in point of fact, Gmail accounts are about as rare as a Pamela Lee STD eruption. Indeed, nearly everyone I know is already on Gmail, including myself. When you get an account, you need only wait five days, and then you are given six invitations to send out to whomever you wish. Use all these, and a few days later you are given more. In this way, Gmail accounts have filtered down to pretty much everyone who wants one by now. Websites have even sprung up here and there around the notion of trading and sharing Gmail invitations. It’s to the point where the actual public release of Gmail is almost totally moot.

If this is intentional on Google’s part (and my imagination can craft no viable scenario in which it is not), it’s a stroke of marketing genius. The modern consumer clamors for items that are rare, and Google has invented just such a shiny trinket without actually making it at all difficult to obtain. There are tens of thousands of people out there counting themselves among the lucky ones who snagged a Gmail account “early”.

I think it’s brilliant and I couldn’t be happier. It was high time we had an alternative to the laughable account limits previously offered by guys like Yahoo and Hotmail, and the text ads are a lot less irritating than the flashy banners and popups employed by most other webmail sites. Some people fear the technology that displays ads based on the actual content of email messages, but as long as there are no actual people looking at the information gleaned in this manner, I won’t complain.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some promising-looking penis enlargement ads to ignore.