Editor's Note: I have 5 invitations available at this moment. If you want an invitation to set up a free GMAIL account, send me an email at qbtpl1 AT gmail.com.

A number of ingenious uses for Google's capacious free email service Gmail have surfaced since the service?s launch. Gmail was created by the web search company Google in April 2004 amid much excitement as every user is promised an unprecedented gigabyte of storage space for messages. Part of the buzz surrounding Gmail has been generated by the fact that an access to the service is by invitation only. When the site was first launched only a restricted number people outside the company were extended an invitation to sign up. After a few weeks these users were given a handful of invites to send to friends who were also able to invite more people a week later. "I know of some people who use their Gmail as storage," Maurice Flanagan told New Scientist. "A gigabyte of space can store quite a few MP3s and some have signed up for multiple accounts and expanded their storage to several gigabytes." Google encourages users to keep all their old messages and automatically searches these to determine what kind of web advertisements might interest users.

But Gmail's copious storage space has inspired a number of programmers to come up with completely novel ways of using the service.

• These include a "weblog" or online message board that uses Gmail to store postings and a desktop file system that plugs straight into the Gmail system. Jonathan Hernandez, a Mexican programmer, took advantage of one such "library", built for the scripting language PHP, to turn his Gmail account into a fully functional online diary or "blog". Sending an email to his account automatically posts a message to the blog, called Gallina. "I was wondering if Gmail could serve as a database for a blog, so a couple hours after I was testing Gallina," he told New Scientist. "I just added support for web comments and attachments to Gallina but I don't know if I'll be adding more features."
• Another coder, Richard Jones, based in Maryland, US, went a stage further, turning his Gmail account into an extra folder for his computer's operating system. Using another programming language called Python, Jones he created an extra file system on the Linux operating system by plugging into Gmail over the internet. "The Gmail File System GmailFS supports most file operations," Jones writes on the project home page. "This means that you can use all your favourite UNIX command line tools to operate on files stored on Gmail."
• Scores of lesser tweaks for Gmail have also surfaced online in recent months, including tools for automatically checking Gmail Gmail Notifier from the desktop or for importing messages from other email accounts. Libgmailer