Ding! Obviously spam or a scam, without even opening the message. How do I know? Well, first the sender’s name has no capitalization. What kind of professional uses a name without capitalizing the first letter of their first and last name? Secondly, the subject screams out programmatic email with the brackets being used as a key to insert website names.

So, what other giveaways are there? I decided to open the message:

So here is what I see

1. Message was dated 6:46 PM and I got it 2 hours later. Not sure that means much.
2. Email address has about 10 digits after the name ellie. So, there is obviously a program generating email addresses. I mean, come on, at least have lisarey123456789@gmail.com
3. The greeting addresses me as “Website Owner”. Another indication of automation and spamming is not addressing you by your real name.
4. An address, but no company name or link to company website. They even say “Our company is on the first page when you search on Google for our primary search term ‘SEO Company’”. REALLY? But you won’t tell me what the name of your company is, huh? (btw, here is the search result for “SEO Company” on Google.
5. They say “Simply reply with opt out if not interested to hear from us”. Not very good English, if you ask me.
6. I also did a search on Google and found other people seeing these types of emails.

So I wonder what would happen if I replied?? Not sure I am going to try to find out

I checked to see if two Gmail user accounts were available, one with dots and one without.

For sake of illustration, let’s just say I checked the availability of:

abcdef

abc.def

Both were available

I created an account with the user name without the dots. Worked just fine.

I then went back and tried to create the username with the dots. No dice!

Apparently, dots are ignored or skipped over or treated as an empty character because Gmail is treating “abcdef” and “abc.def” the exact same (I really doubt someone else took the “abc.def” account in a matter of 20 seconds after I created the “abcdef” account).

I just found this strange.

Well, talk about interesting. As seen in this article, Google has dropped the beta label from its web browser, called Chrome.

 
Why do I find this interesting? Well, a product coming out of beta into release is actually kinda normal in software development. But, I have been using Gmail for over 4 years, and it is still in Beta!! I even wrote about this before.

 
Something tells me that Gmail is a little more stable than Chrome at this point in time. Maybe I am wrong. Heck, though, there isn’t even a Mac version of Chrome yet!

OK, it is late 2007. I have over 5000 messages in my inbox (and that is even after a few month hiatus where I went back to Hotmail). Gmail has millions and millions of users.

So, why, oh why, is Gmail still called “Beta”?

I would really appreciate someone giving me an answer to that question. My thinking is that it is an “out” for Google in case something goes wrong with Gmail — “Oh, it is beta software. Use at your own risk. If you are adverse to beta software risk, wait until the official release of Gmail, which will be……” NEVER!!