If you know what GMail is (a free EMail service by Google), then you probably already know that GMail invites (also free, but hard to come by) are selling like hotcakes on EBay.

The going rate at the moment is about 5 bucks apiece, as of August 2. The prices have been rapidly depreciating the past few weeks (at first they were selling for far more) and soon, when GMail goes public, the price will drop to zero. But right now, there's still a small amount of money to be made by selling invites. As the supply of invites has been going down the past few days, we may see a small bump in the price in the near future.

The only way to get GMail invites is to get them from other GMail members, or to be offered them by the Google GMail system. The folks who are selling large lots of invites on EBay simply have a lot of personal GMail accounts, and are using them to harvest more invites.

An enterprising scam artist (powersalesmps) is selling a "GMail Invite Generator" on EBay, along with some other bits of apparently useless information. This piqued my interest, so I sent a few inquiries to the folks who have purchased this thing, to find out what it is. I have determined that it is indeed a scam that exploits the mathematical illiteracy of the buyer.

The generator is very similar to this one, which I wrote in Javascript. It uses a random-number-generator to generating a GMail Invite URL. As it turns out, my "free" version has a slightly higher chance of getting a "hit" than the one being sold by powersalesmps, however, they are both USELESS - read on.

The randomly generated URLS sent out by EBay as invites look like this, containing a sequence of 30 random digits.

http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-1a2b3ca82e-5ce1457689-bde15a0c5e

The "generator" script works by generating a random combination of these digits and hoping for a "hit". Assuming Google has 2 million valid invites to give away at any one time, your chances of getting all 30 of these digits correct is approximately

1 in 2⁹⁹ or

1 in 633,825,300,114,114,700,748,351,602,688

Your chances of getting struck by lightning are MUCH higher. You do the math!

However, if you'd like to send your mathematically illiterate friends to a useless 'Gmail Invite Generator', here it is. It explicitly states the odds, but many folks don't seem to have a firm grasp of statistics and click away anyway.

Human superstitions about "luck" are a funny thing. Despite the fact that I have clearly stated how poor the odds are, my weblogs show that a large number of people have been reloading my "gmail generator" page repeatedly, probably attempting to get a hit. I doubt anyone would click on this button, which is not linked to any kind of script:

Update:

http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-5ce404a8e1-??????????

Although this seems like it has better odds, the odds of this method working are actually ZERO.

Google structures the invites with 3 groups of 10 random digits, like so:

http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-AAAAAAAAAA-BBBBBBBBBB-CCCCCCCCCC

The "A" group identifies the person sending the invite. The "B" group identifies the person receiving the invite and the "C" group is a "checksum" that verifies it for accuracy.

If you send an invite following the formula shown above being used by "powersalesmps", you will always get a reject message. Since the person identified by "5ce404a8e1" has long-since exhausted all his invites, the script being sold by "powersalesmps" simply won't work at all, and never will.

Even if the person identified by "5ce404a8e1" were to receive 10 more invites, the invites generated by this script don't include the all-important 10-digit checksum at the end, and so will be rejected by the Gmail system.

If you've been fooled by this scam, then consider giving "powersalesmps" negative feedback, to help warn others off.