Rolando Ruiz Cifuentes was willing to trade five bottles of Chilean wine for one.

Jeffrey Vos said he'd put a message of choice in a bottle and toss it into the Ohio River if someone would give him one. Others have offered to swap everything from a free night of undercover surveillance in Denver to a private boat tour of the Venetian canals for the prestige of having one.

The hot commodity they are begging to barter for is Gmail -- Google's coveted and currently limited free e-mail service that gives users a gigabyte (1000 megabytes) of e-mail storage space. That's the equivalent of 500,000 e-mail pages -- more than 100 times what most other free webmail services offer, Google says on its Web site.

The extra storage has e-mail pack rats rejoicing -- they can save a lifetime of e-mail messages without ever having to delete a single one!

But the way Google has rolled out the new service is what's really creating a buzz. The search engine giant has offered the Gmail accounts by invitation only during its current testing phase, making those who have them the object of envy and enterprise from those who don't.

David Gong received an invitation to create a Gmail account through a friend of a friend who works for Google right after the service was introduced in April.

"The first thing that grabbed my attention was the one gigabyte of space," says Gong, 25, who moved from Squirrel Hill to Philadelphia only two weeks ago. "My experience with Yahoo and Hotmail was that if someone sent you an attachment or photo, you'd be at risk of having your account suspended because you'd be over the storage limit."

That's not a problem with Gmail. Gong also likes the way e-mails with matching subject headers are automatically threaded together in his inbox -- enabling him to save entire back-and-forth e-mail conversations. And he enjoys being able to search his Gmail for keywords or phrases with the speed and precision of a Google search.

The frenzy surrounding Gmail just adds to the fun. Because Gong has a Gmail account, he occasionally receives Gmail account invitations that he can give to others and friends have lobbied him for them.

On eBay, people are auctioning Gmail invitations for anywhere from a penny to $80 each.

And as Cifuentes and Vos demonstrate, people are willing to swap some interesting and unusual goods and services for the chance to be a member of the first-generation of Gmailers.

"Gmail is by far the best e-mail service I have used," says Jeff Chiao, 22, of Shadyside.

Chiao received a Gmail invite through a friend. After he received Gmail invites to give away, he visited the web site, www.gmailswap.com, where people offer goods and services they're willing to trade for a Gmail account. That's where he found Cifuentes, who was willing to swap the bottles of Chilean wine.

"I haven't got plenty of money so I thought, 'What can I offer that is special and not expensive?' " Cifuentes, 25, of Santiago, Chile, wrote in an e-mail. "Chilean wine is recognized all over the planet and not very expensive."

Chiao was willing to give him two Gmail account invitations for the wine. However, food and drug regulations prohibit the shipment of Chilean wine into the United States.

"The swap never took place," says Chiao, who will be a University of Pittsburgh medical student in August. "I have since used the invites on family and friends."

People have gotten extremely creative about what they'll trade in exchange for a Gmail invitation.

"If you give me a Gmail account, I will put a message of your choice, printed or handwritten, in a wine bottle and throw it into the Ohio River near Pittsburgh," writes Vos, 13, of Beaver in a post at www.gmailswap.com. "...I will give you a digital photo album of me putting the bottle into the river as proof that I have done it."

A culinary institute graduate in New York is willing to prepare a six-course meal for four in exchange for a Gmail invitation. Others have offered hand-crocheted stuffed animals, a customized duct-tape wallet in blue or red and even a photo of a cat in a wet suit in exchange for an invitation.

"You can get everything from a postcard from anywhere in the world or a couch to stay on if you're in Rio for Carnivale to a tarantula in the mail or a vest made of discarded AOL CDs," says Sean Michaels of Ottawa, Canada, who created www.gmailswap.com May 17.

"I had obtained Gmail a couple weeks before," says Michaels, a recent graduate of McGill University with an English degree. "I didn't find it anything special but I had friends who were screaming for access and looking around the web."

Early on, buying a Gmail invitation on eBay was one of the only alternatives to receiving one from Google or a friend.

"I really didn't like the crass commercialism of [eBay]," Michaels says. "It turned me off.

"I decided to create a conduit for people to get in touch with people who might be interested in these things and trade," he says.

More than 50,000 offers to swap have been posted at gmailswap.com since it began with pages on the site being viewed more than 380,000 times.

Because Gmail is new, a lot of e-mail address names are still available. Some Internet savvy types with an entrepreneurial spirit have been creating and auctioning Gmail addresses that use popular phrases, famous persons' names or established business names.

Bidding on eBay for NewYorkNewYork@gmail.com is starting at $50. Someone is trying to get at least $69.99 for the e-mail address DetroitPistons@gmail.com and someone wants at least $240.40 for the e-mail address ronaldwilsonreagan@gmail.com. Bidding for the e-mail addresses spamblocker@gmail.com and blockspam@gmail.com is starting at $100. And someone wants $499.99 for the e-mail address gumball3000@gmail.com.

Michaels credits Gmail's popularity to the gigabyte of space, the cultural capital of the Google brand and the belief that Gmail will become the standard.

"If everyone is going to have a Gmail account, it's worth something to have a good user name at that address," Michaels says. "More than anything, the scramble is to get the account name you want before the barbarians break through the gates."

Because Google is slated to go public soon, the company is keeping a low corporate profile these days. A company spokesman wouldn't say when Gmail will be available free to the general public or how many people are using it during this test period.

In the meantime, some of Google's competitors are jumping into the fray.

Yahoo! Inc. announced last week that it has increased the e-mail storage on its free e-mail accounts to 100 megabytes, up from four megabytes. And for $19.99 a year, premium e-mail users can have two gigabytes (2000 megabytes) of e-mail storage space.

"With the new Yahoo! Mail, consumers won't have to think about mailbox size," says Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo's communications products vice president.

Yahoo's streamlined e-mail is faster and easier to use. And it's also making available to users millions of e-mail addresses that have been dormant for six months or more.

For all the talk about increased storage, people value spam protection and junk e-mail filtering more than extra megabytes of space, said David Card, a senior Internet analyst with Jupiter Research in New York.

The top five e-mail features are spam protection, the ability to access e-mail from any computer, the ability to send large file attachments, the ability to use one address book across multiple e-mail accounts and larger storage, according to a Jupiter Research survey of 3,700 online adults in May.

However, because of all the hoopla surrounding Gmail and improved Yahoo e-mail, Card expects storage to rank higher on the list when the survey is conducted again next year.