AdWeek reports, citing a Merrill Lynch report, that Google is now offering Gmail generally to the public, putting up invitations to join to about five percent of homepage visitors. Gmail's free gigabyte of storage has made it both expensive to offer for free and capable of exploiting vast search features that other free email systems simply can't offer. Rumors have persisted that Google planned to open up the service generally in Q2 2005, a year after its first launch. In what might be an unrelated development, MarketingShift reports its first Gmail-originated spam message.