Perhaps you could make script like in slashdot (for mod points)? The more a person visits your blog/posts the better chnace he would have of getting the prize?

I'd say find people who want one, and then choose between them at random to be fair; or be more complex and count how many times they've posted and factor that in.

maybee you could make a list of some bugs on bugzilla and if someone manage to fix one of the bugs the one who solved it could get himself a gmail-account...

In theory the number of comments would work, but that could just lead to a thousand "yeah, nice." comments just to bump the numbers (actual wording would vary, of course ;) ) I like the idea of just picking at random from people who want them. (Although admittedly I don't know how /. does it, so their idea might work; it could be too much work for a small scale contest like this though)

I would consider submitting something productive as a nice idea for such a contest. Working is necessary everywhere and to win a prize, a little bit of work couldn't harm! Why not demanding a short text with the reasons they use Mozilla Firefox? Those texts could be quoted onto the Firefox product pages as User Experiences. That's really killing two birds with one stone ;-) (no, there is no association to *bird :)

Being an active part of the Mozilla community should be the key I think - but not not just the technical side of creating extensions or fixing bugs (not all of us can!)

Lots of people (including me...) without the necessary programming skills help out too - submitting bug reports, making test cases, confirming other bugs, helping others on MozillaZine, blog posts, converting people on other forums....you get the idea

Hm. I'm kinda surprised that the answer doesn't involve "most bugs resolved during bugday" or "most bugs reported and not marked invalid/duplicate/etc", but I guess the problem there is that those people won't necessarily read your blog or be interested in a free e-mail address. So what about most thought-provoking Ask Asa? At least you get to judge that :)

I'll take a GMAIL account. :)

You could recognise "evangelism points", those that manage to convert the most amount of users to Gecko products, or come up with fresh ideas for doing so.

Maybe a mars rover triva question, or someone thats confirmed a good amount of bugs. I could use a gmail account for my bugmail, i get too much on my school acount

Have everyone post a plug for Firefox 0.9 and Mozilla 1.7 on their web page's/ blog's front page, provide the URL, and then pick a winner from those who put up the promo at random? I'll be plugging the new releases anyway, but more exposure is a plus - a Gmail account would be good incentive.

Mozilla QA volunteer filing bug reports, testing, creating testcases since 2000, especially focused on crasher bug reports.
Mozillazine member since Nov'02, I'd use Gmail search capabilities to store all my bugmail and search within this folder to find a particular bug quicker (could be very useful with full-text search for stacktraces).

The only limit is only your imagination. Here are some hints on how I would choose the lucky one.

1. Since your blog is Mozilla related it definetly should be a Mozilla product user. Why not? :)
2. Take a map and mark your country/city or whatever place you live in. Then mark the oposite place on the map and choose one country. Better if it is an exotic conutry you never heard about, or just a country/place you want to visit, like, want to know more about it or any other reason.
3. If there are no users from that country choose the nearest one.
4. Ask them some simple questions - what do you do for living, how did you find out about mozilla, what do you like or don't like about it or just ask to tell more about their country.
5. Ask them to translate something like "I love Mozilla" in their language. ;)
And so on...

It would be interesting to find out that in some exotic country people use Mozilla, too. Imagine - you go to bed to have some sleep but in the same time somewhere on the globe some guy who speaks some other language uses the same product you used some minutes ago... It would be nice to use Firefox to access Gmail, too. Don't you think? :)

Maybe the unofficial builders? :-P

I'd say use your own judgement and reward participants in your blog or elsewhere. Randomly if you want, or maybe those that have made a positive impression on you. Who cares if it's fair or not? They're yours to do with what you want, right? :)

(I wouldn't refuse one btw :)

You could use the second contest to get people to come up with an idea for the third! Not very original, I know, but it scales well.

You could choose a real number in the open interval (-inf,+inf) and ask people to guess it. Closest person after a week of guesses wins.

Some people have suggested tying it to Mozilla participation, and someone mentioned the Rover. How about tying it to something less obvious that the really dedicated readers (stalkers?) would know? Have all the people who wished you a happy birthday got Gmail addresses?

You could donate them to charity, for auction (if Google allows it.)

You could decide not to give them away at all but to register them, post them on popular websites, wikis, mailing lists and usenet groups and race their spam counts against each other.

You could test how far people will go to get one, eg. replacing a personal (better yet, a business) website with a single page featuring only a request for your consideration, or posting a picture of a person standing naked in the middle of a busy street with a sign saying "I want a Gmail address, Asa!"

You could give one to the first person to respond every time you announce that you have one to give away.

You could have some form of composition contest. Ask people to write a creative piece, a short story, a poem, a haiku or a filk on the subject of "Asa's Gmail" (to make sure it has been composed for this contest.) It could be a different kind of piece each time you offer one.

How about you have people pick a date in the next month (1 person/day). The person that picks the day on which you're given the next account gets it.

Have someone design and develop a new blog for you (conforming to web standards, of course). The best design (either by a vote or you pick it) wins.

Another idea: hold a contest for best wallpaper. The best design (either by a vote or you pick it) wins.

Could give it out to whoever does the most bug triage on bugdays, would be checked obviously so people dont just go about removing valid bugs.

You could figure out who is the most active for comments and give it to them. Then go down the list. Or if someone usually comes up with really good comments, give it to them.

...or you could just give me one ;-).

From economic point of view, it is the matter of scare resources that can't meet the needs of everyone. It is better to give gmail to anyone who needs it most.

For economic efficiency, I suggest to hold an auction for gmail account. People who are willing to donate the largest amount to mozilla foundation will get the gmail account. It can ensure that people who most hardly need gmail get the e-mail account while mozilla community can benefit as well.

If people are not willing to pay money for gmail account, you can use services for mozilla instead. However, it is difficult to judge the value of services and determine who should get gmail account.

I think you should try to branch out to new communities. Otherwise, there will always be outsiders. Being an astronomer, I'd love to eventually hand these out to other astronomers. We can really use the storage (since we send sevarl MB attachments frequently).

Suggestion 1:
For the person that makes the best Ask Asa question of the week/month however often you choose to do it

Suggestion 2:
The person that is most active on bugzilla during a given time period that has thier name down for the contest. (im sure you can get a list of who has been most active)

Suggestion 3:
Alternative stylesheets for adot's notblog

Waah... please. I want an account :)
I will name my first child after you. *g*

I got Gmail account already (actually I've *just* used up of 3 invitations).

Suggestion: help improve the Winstripe theme so that Qute lovers will say it rocks too... (jokingly)...

I think people who offer chocolate even though they have no way of getting it to the other side of the Atlantic and even if they did wouldn't send it as they'd eat it themselves should be considered.

Me for example.

Give it to whomever has the highest bugs filed in Bugzilla...:)

I could really need an account.

Maybe people could post pictures of their vehicle's odometer showing its mileage. Whoever has the highest mileage wins. :-D

Give it to the maker of the most popular Mozilla (Firefox, Thunderbird included) extensions from extensionroom.mozdev.org. They should have statistics about that.

Failing which, give it to the most active person on Bugzilla in terms of patches submitted.

I also really like Chris' idea on holding an auction and having the proceeds go to the Mozilla Foundation. *thumbs up*

How about we all mail naked pictures of ourselves and a commission decides who's the prettiest?

(Of course, then I wouldn't get an account, but I have about as many chances as in the other proposed contests ;-))

Dare to be diffrent:
What makes IE better then Mozilla contest ;)

Sorry for being uninformed here but what on earth is a gmail account and why would anyone want it?

After selecting the first person, take the name's/nick's last letter and find the person, whose nick starts with that letter (or if there is no such person - use the next to the last letter etc). If you have more than one person with the same first letter - search for the next to the last letter of the nick of the original person.
For example:
Ruslan -> Noam -> Michael
or
Ruslan -> Asa -> Adam
or
Ruslan -> (Nick, Noam) => [N]o[a]m -> Michael

Gmail is Google's free webmail service. Currently it is not yet open to public. Only people invited by Google's staffs or existing Gmail users can register for a Gmail account.

See: http://gmail.google.com/gmail

Give it to the person with the most accurate guess of when Gmail will come out of beta. By then we won't need invitations so no-one will feel left out.

Randomly select who to give it to from all of the comments here (making sure to count all of mine as seperate suggestions ;-)).

How about you announce when you have one available in a post, and the quickest commenter gets it?

See who has the most unique Google hits on their name, first and last in quotes, that specificly relates to them.

As in "Bob Johnston" where the resulting pages refer to the exact same Bob Johnston, not every single Bob, and are located at unique websites, so if Bob owns/writes for a website, his site counts once, not for every page.

How about a online treasure hunt where people are given clues on your website and have to search out information on the net.
The person how gives all the correct awnswers posted first in the comment box wins the invite. That would be good and people would have to pay for an invite anymore.
Plus it'd be fun

Related to above post ^
|
The tresure hunt should be related to mozilla (since thats what your sites about) e.g name of developers of firefox etc.

In the spirit of having an actual contest (which you didn't specify, you just said to "suggest the best way to hand out future accounts" - but I assume you'd consider contests) how about a rare entries contest? You ask some questions and the object is to give correct answers that other people don't give. You get one point for every person that gave the same answer as you if you're right; you get one point for every person who competed if you're wrong. The ideal score is one point for each question (All right and all unique answers). Some questions would have loads of possible answers ("Name a country"), some would have very few ("Name one of the catagories for Nobel prizes"). If you didn't want to put time into setting up a quiz like this you couldbribe someone to do it for you (say with a Gmail invitation).

the top N people who send you the best tasting free food...

Since a gigabit of e-mail is a lot of space, you probably want to give it to someone who can best use the space. The contest should be to for people to send you how they plan on using GMAIL.

Google should require users who use G-mail to install a piece of software on thier machine. The software will install the awesomely cool googlebar, delete thier spyware, and other dumb copycat toolbar search applications. It should also change thier default search engine from MSN to google.com.

Google would then be really cool cause it will make your machine run better, get rid of unwanted software, piss off microsoft, and give people a gig of e-mail!! GOOGLE WOULD ROCK!!!

On a side note, I'm a starving poor computer science major who could put a gig of e-mail to very good use! I can speak and sit on command and I'd be very grateful for a gmail account.

The prize should go to the person who best explains to Rick the reason why his suggestion would incur an antitrust case. Though his idea for the "tell me what you'll do with it" contest is pretty cool sounding.

Well, I would put it to good use because I'm being suspended due to the fact that my GPA last semester was below a 1.0 (maybe I should have gone to class after the first day, or taken the tests, or something... heh), and thus my bu.edu account is being frozen for the next six months.

I need an account with lots of space because I'll be in Mexico for the next month and 1/2 doing sea lion research with little internet access and I don't want spam or overzealous picture sharing attachments to fill up my mailbox and make me miss messages. After mexico, I'll be in Ecuador again with no internet for over a month, then American Samoa for four months, not sure about internet there, but it would be nice not to worry about it. :)

That's my submission for the "who needs it most/will use it best" contest, but I think an odometer/vehicle condition photo and entertaining story about said vehicle contest would be a fun one.

you should hold a contest, and at a random time, when it is least likely for someone to post something, inform the bloggers that the next 2-5(depending on number of G MAIL accounts) people to either post a comment on the thread or send you a message on an instant messanger, wins the g mail account.

another idea:

think of a number 1-1000 and whoever comes closest (or how many people come closest) wins the account(s)

How about contacting everyone interested and giving the invite to the first reply.

Use the URL to contact me

Please someone contact google and tell them to give me a gmail account i need that shit

I hope I'm not overstepping my bounds to comment here, but in case you can't get a Gmail account here and would like to try your luck somewhere else, I have a Gmail contest going on at my site right now. Good luck.

I really do badly need a Gmail account.

please put me in the competition.
Thanks

Saboor Khawaja