After nearly a year and a half, and on the heels of Google Talk, anyone (with a mobile phone in the US) can finally get their their own Gmail account without an invite. Check out the creativity in how they are dispersing Gmail accounts:

Why use mobile phones? It’s a way to help us verify that an account is being created by a real person, and that one person isn’t creating thousands of accounts. We want to keep our system as spam-free as possible, and making sure accounts are used by real people is one way to do that.

I guess if one does not have a US Mobile phone, they still need an invite, although Google says they are “working hard” to support non-US mobile phones. The war against spammers never ends!