I sent another Gmail invitation today.
The recipient was a friend who also appears in Praxis Technology correspondence. His current address was still an EarthLink account. Gmail was not open to everybody yet, so creating an account required an invitation from an existing user.
Google's automated message did most of the work. It told the recipient that I had invited him to open a free account and included the registration link. The surviving copy does not include a personal note from me.
I had been using Gmail for about a month. The account was already receiving travel documents, equipment correspondence, and messages forwarded from work. I had also sent repeated tests between Gmail and my SimAuthor address. In an October note to another friend, I recommended Gmail because of its large mailbox and told him I had used one of my invitations on him.
The November invitation is a small marker for how communication was changing around the work. Praxis was still active as my systems and network consulting company. Client and collaborator email could come through personal accounts, company domains, and employer addresses. A searchable mailbox with enough storage to keep old threads was useful even before it became the archive I am reading now.
I cannot tell from this message whether the recipient accepted the invitation or which address he used afterward. I also cannot claim that Praxis moved its business mail to Gmail. The company continued to use its own domain, and later messages still show several addresses in use.
The fact is narrower. On November 16, 2005, I spent one of the limited invitations to give a regular collaborator another email option. The automated notice went out, and a copy remained in my sent mail.
At the time it was a routine account setup. Twenty years later, it is part of the surviving record of how I worked.