Google Releases Gmail Notifier

Philipp Lenssen writes "After several unofficial, screen-scraping Gmail utilities, Google now released the official Gmail Notifier (Beta) for Windows. It will sit in the Windows tray, alerting you of new emails in your account (if you are lucky enough to have one already). Additionally, the Gmail Notifier can connect 'mailto:'-links in web pages to Gmail."

Comments

new mail notification sound

[ack154]

From the FAQ, it also says that it can play a sound when new mail arrives. And that sound is actually just the Windows New Mail Notification sound in the Control Panel.

And it's been mentioned before, but I still think the Gmail Loader is still a handy utility. I'm migrating a lot of my mail and accounts in to Gmail and this thing was a huge help.

Re:new mail notification sound

[ack154]

Yes, it does still have that limitation. And yes, it does seem to be on the Gmail side and I'm pretty sure there isn't much that can be done about it (short of Gmail making an import mail utility to function correctly).

But ya, it does kind of suck. But when I imported my stuff, I'm just importing old mail and I really don't care what the date is (for searching or not) - because if I want to refer to any of it, I'll just be searching by it's content.

Re:new mail notification sound

[jhoffoss]

Actually, after looking, doing something like "find all within x days" is not difficult at all, and is in fact the only way you can search for a date.

Gmail->Search Options:
Date within: [1d, 3d, 1w, 2w, 1mo, 2mo, 6mo, 1y] of [e.g. today, Friday, Mar 26 or 3/26/2004].

Doing this within 3d of 12/5/02 turned up fourteen messages that were sent in that range. Which is about accurate. Now, I'm not going to go through four years of email to see if that got them all, but I can nail a date down that small, I'll remember another characteristic of the message to search on, rather than the date.

The whole point of gmail's design (i.e. no folders, only labels) is that you filter/label mail, which I did as I migrated all my mail. I have email from eight classes segregated, and it broke the messages into conversations properly, rather than each separate message displayed on it's own line.

Google has designed gmail better than I thought it could be done. There are some features there (undoubtedly more undocumented) that I would never have thought of including. For instance the date range search!

The fact that it dispalys all my migrated mail as received july 27 is odd considering what I just said, but all that mail is archived and there only for me to dig back for something specific.

Oh, and the spam filtering is aggressive (almost too much so), which I think is great, compared to missing every few spams and dropping them to the inbox.

Re:new mail notification sound

[jhoffoss]

Actually, after looking, doing something like "find all within x days" is not difficult at all, and is in fact the only way you can search for a date.

<sheepishly>

I'm wrong, it does not hit migrated mail dates properly when searching on date. I mistyped my date and only glanced down at what looked like was correct. Upon fixing it, gmail does not search this way.

/me goes to submit feature request to gmail team

GTRAY

[Yo Grark]

Gtray has been working FABULOUSLY for me.

Don't need to switch unless there are more options that google can provide; which from the website there isn't any.

http://torrez.us/gtray

Yo Grark

FireFox extension

[GizmoToy]

I've been using something similar as an extension to FireFox. It works pretty darn well, but you obviously have to keep your web browser open for it to work. This program might be pretty cool, I'll have to give it a shot.

For those interested, the Firefox extension can be found here:
Gmail Notifier

Re:FireFox extension

[Shelrem]

Heh, beat me to it!

In addition to this, add on WebmailCompose (previously GmailCompose) and you've got pretty much the full functionality of this gmail toolbar, plus it's cross-platform, for those of you who use several platforms and want a more unified computing experience.

For the record, i've been terribly happy with this combination for a while. Together with the great featureset of Gmail, it makes Webmail actually pleasant to use!

For Mac users

[jdwest]

Mac users have this http://homepage.mac.com/carsten.guenther/GmailStat us/ as a freeware option.

Gmail Notifier

[Stypen]

This is something that has been in the fires for a while for Firefox users. Doron Rosenberg authored an extension that allows the same functionality. You can find it here.

Re:How long....

[Tranzig]

What about the gmail notifier Firefox extension?

Re:How long....

[Mickut]

There is already a Mozilla (and Firefox) extension for this, GMail Notifier (homepage http://www.nexgenmedia.net/extensions/). It works with both the Linux and windows versions of the browser.

Re:Where is the notifier for

[ravydavygravy]

In the increasingly useful gdesklets framewrok:
http://gdesklets.gnomedesktop.org/cate gories.php?f unc=gd_show_app&gd_app_id=171

Doesn't work with NT4

[Kuad]

Generally, I'm not logged into the net at home on a 24 hour basis - I disconnect my DSL whenever I don't need it. Paranoia can have its advantages.

Anyways, I need this tool at work. And some of us are still stuck with NT4 at work until the end of the year (when support dies and they finally upgrade us). This tool doesn't work with NT4, and I gather it doesn't work with 95/98/ME from the installer's error message. Just a heads-up for everyone.

Personally, GTray works fine for me.

save a draft

[sirshannon]

They say they are working on it.

Available wherever Firefox is

[Duke Machesne]

I've been enjoying both of those key functionalities on every platform I use, by way of two excellent firefox extensions: Gmail Notifier and Gmail Compose.

Re:Why not a small Java app?

[bygimis]

You can indeed put a Java app in the Windows system tray. The same code will also put it in the Gnome system tray in Linux for example - all part of the Java Desktop open source tools at;

http://community.java.net/javadesktop/

Re:How long....

[buchan232]

Hey, THANK YOU. This works great, one little problem, your link goes to an old version. Here http://nexgenmedia.net/extensions/ is the developers page for the latest version. The version you link to has issues but once I updated it works perfectly.

Re:Wow... Breakthrough

[buchan232]

You know ... I thought this very same thing. Then one day I clicked my spam folder and there was a whole pile of them in there.

Have a look, you may not be as anonymous as you think :-)

Re:Swamped by GMail invites ?

[Espectr0]

Dude, give them to the military.

http://www.gmail4troops.com/