I was an early Gmail SRE so I was able to circumvent the restrictions. It was a bad idea it turns out. For a project I also created "[email protected]" and caused a production outage due to the volume of mail it got forwarded. =)

But yes your right, 6 characters is the minimum of "open" gmail accounts. I know of at least a dozen 2 character accounts created by insiders though.

I am 'pwinnski' nearly everywhere now, because on April 1, 2005, I was not allowed to create a gmail account of only the first five characters. Goodbye to 15 years of the old 5-character username, and hello to what is now 15 years of the new 8-character username!

At the time, I thought about pestering my Google-employee friends, but decided to just suck it up.

Synchronicity: You joined HN June 28, 2016 I joined May 8, 2016

Weird. I wonder if you told me about it back then, or it was a coincidence.

That is such an interesting question; it could be either one IMHO, with equal likelihood

I got a friend that also snatched a 5-letter Gmail account back in the day. He was kind enough to facilitate that I get one to but I got my own domain since forever so didn't get to get one.

> I was an ... SRE ...... I ... caused a production outage

I have nothing to add, except that you made me smile on a Friday afternoon.

Google war story: we used to get digital badges on our employee profiles to indicate useful things like ability to write c++ or python, or having worked on a specific project, etc. I got "porn cookie" for working on the safe search stuff.

Anyway, I designed a badge called "I broke Gmail" that would get applied to anybody that did exactly that. I intended a hint of shame but I got a wall of emails asking to get it with explanations of how each had broken the service at some point.

Nearly all SRE's have caused an outage of some kind... The trick is to design your systems well enough that even when there is an outage few/no people notice...

that's a fantastic outage :)