Wannabe users offering wacky online trades for precious beta account invitations.

Jennifer Lee said she was a happy Gmail user thanks to her Blogger connections -- until her boyfriend got jealous and deleted her account.

"He didn't mean to go 'all the way' but did by mistake," she says. And after her taste of the "forbidden fruit," Lee really wanted another Gmail account.

Gmail accounts are a rarity since Google is still in its beta phase, and has only extended invitations to Google employees, associates and Blogger users. Some wannabe users have turned to other sources, including eBay with people bidding up to $100. Lee found that demeaning -- but then she discovered GmailSwap.

GmailSwap is a Web site that has made it fun -- and amusing –- to obtain or dump a Gmail account. Sean Michaels, the 22-year-old brainchild behind it, launched the site a week ago, and has seen 4,975 swaps and 46,000 unique visitors so far.

Alas, the things Gmail wannabe users do for an account. If you have a Gmail invitation you want to get rid of, it could get you unopened Pokemon cards or a one-week vacation rental in Maui or a chance to have an online girlfriend for a month.

Andy Jones,  who teaches English at the University of California, Davis, offered prospective Gmail benefactors a chance to read a poem on his weekly radio show. He says that his students are fascinated with Google's search engine capabilities, making the search engine a much-discussed topic on his show.

"I want to see what Gmail is about," Jones says, who has yet to find his Gmail-bearing poetry lover. There's one addendum to his offer: "I have to approve the poem -- I'm not in the market for bad poetry."

The fact that Google plans to scan Gmail accounts concerns Jones, who says that Gmail would be a tertiary account for him.

So what is the appeal of Gmail, despite being a free account with 1 GB of space?

"First of all, people like and respect Google. They're confident that a company whose philosophy is 'don't be evil' will churn out a useful, intelligent, non-exploitive service," says Michaels, a recent graduate for McGill University in Montreal. The second reason people are excited is the features of Gmail itself –- the clean, banner-free interface, the 1G of space."

But there's another attraction for Gmail wannabes.

"The net-savvy are desperate to nab a high-caliber Gmail account name. Gmail is perceived as a giant-killer –- it will replace Hotmail as the de facto standard for Web mail –- and having a catchy, simple account-name will be a source of Internet cache," Michaels says.

Brian Glick was excited to be able to select from a surplus of user names.

"Everyone says it's the next big thing," says Glick, a computer science major at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. "It's going to leapfrog what Yahoo! and Hotmail are doing."

At first Glick offered some CDs, but got no response. So he changed his strategy and came up with a "mystery birthday gift on your BDay." Sixty seconds later he had a Gmail account.

"Everyone, of course, loves getting and opening presents, and I figured that the idea of a mystery box instead of a known quantity might win out. I mustered up as creative a write-up as I could and posted it, and had a response within a minute; it was pretty amazing," Glick wrote from his new Gmail account.

Glick has a long time to reflect on what kind of gift to get his Gmail sponsor, whose birthday isn't until January.

"I'm hoping Google will create a calendar or reminder system."