Do offline accounts get rewards?

I started running a node on mainnet over 24 hours ago, I created a new wallet and account, the account is still offline as I don’t have enough microalgos to participate.

Judging by the last 24 hours it will take a while before I make enough rewards to participate, is there a way to improve my setup so I get rewards faster?

I’ve read about relay nodes but it looks like after I setup a relay node I will have to send an email somewhere to get it registered, is that true?

I think you’d be interested in the information from here:

In Algorand, every user is an equal member of the community and earns an amount of rewards proportional to their stake for every block that is committed to the chain.

Since the rewards are proportional to the account stake and, from what I can understand you’re saying, your balance is zero, then you won’t get rewards.

From another angle, if that was the case someone could automatically generate millions of new accounts and get free Algos.

I’m a bit confused here, by stake I thought it just means contributing CPU time. Like bitcoin or whatever, not account stake as in algos.

So if I understand correctly, if I don’t have algos, I don’t contribute CPU time and therefore I will never get rewards?

If that’s the case, what happens If I purchase a bunch of algos from somewhere, can I transfer them to an offline account?

By stake it means Algos, not any other kind of hardware resource since doesn’t rely on Proof of Work consensus but Proof of Stake. I’d recommend taking a look at this video from Silvio.

So yes, if you don’t have Algos, you’ll not get rewards.

If you purchase Algos or get them in future auctions, you can transfer them to an account you own. To understand the concept of online/offline, I think you can check this thread where @JasonW replied to some questions.