Slashdot Mirror
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."
this is just one of the tools i've been waiting for. now if only gmail could have a "save as draft" feature...i can switch from my current webmail provider to gmail.
Is it 5:30 yet?
When will it learn to say "You got mail!" ?
www.weberseite.at
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.
How long until someone reverse-engineers this API and makes an OS X and Linux client available?
This space intentionally left blank.
I mean, come on, Win32 only?
I keep my browser open all the time (including a tab to gmail) and it refreshes automatically. I don't see the benefit, unless having Yet More processes running is a good thing.
Trolling is a art,
Now I will have an up to the minute report of exactly how MUCH spam im getting. And with a Gig of email space, I can learn about Coeds who want to show me thier cams, and low cost Ci@lis, maybe even learn how to start a buisness-- all without having to clear my inbox every two days.
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
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
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
This is obviously the first step by google towards integration of search and the personal interaction space.
How long before our contact lists in gmail are moved to orkut and into a messenger?
I wonder if Google collects statistics on how many and what type of operating systems hit google a day... I am betting a large percentage of people that use Gmail don't use Windows. I reserve the right to be wrong.
Mac users have this http://homepage.mac.com/carsten.guenther/GmailStat us/ as a freeware option.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
Google...good
Windows...evil
Windows only Google app...does not compute!
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I wonder if someone here has the same problem as me: I get constantly swamped with GMail invites. Far too much people are sending me these stupid invites and it's really getting on my nerves.
Well, it was fun for the first 20 or so, but now it's really annoying. Even people I just remotely know are sending me this stuff.
I usually sign them up with bogus data just to stop this madness but it doesn't really work.
Does anyone know when Google is stopping its beta test ? I hope soon otherwise I see a nervous breakdown coming.
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.
Opportunities of a lifetime must be seized within the lifetime of the opportunity. - Linda Ravenhill
Why don't they just skin Windows? They have the toolbar, mail checker client thing, searcher bar that can sit in the task bar. I mean, just have google be a part of every single app on the desktop.
In the increasingly useful gdesklets framewrok:e gories.php?f unc=gd_show_app&gd_app_id=171
http://gdesklets.gnomedesktop.org/cat
I wonder what operating systems the users of this will be usuing. Maybe a larger-than-average percentage of people who use Gmail are on Linux instead of Windows. What then?
I mean those of us who autohide the taskbar. It's not clear whether the notifier will pop up or not (and we may not want it to - the possibility for distraction is obvious).
You can get it to play a sound, but the FAQ says it may notify in error up to two minutes after all new mail's been cleared. Beep! Beep! BEEP! Urrgh....
This is great! I know people who have been holding back on using GMail because of the notification thing. I sometimes still get email at my Yahoo account, and I am notified when I receive them. Every time the Yahoo notification thing pops up I am reminded of how almost-but-not-quite perfect GMail is. This little icon in the tray will end up being a bigger deal than it looks.
I've installed it and it works great. It uses the same slide-up text bubble idiom that AIM and Yahoo and Thunderbird use. But the bubble not only tells you that you have mail but also who it is from and if there is room, the first part of the text of the email. If you missed it, you can right click and select 'Tell me again...' and it will scroll through all your unread emails, so you can get a quick overview of what's going on in your Inbox right now without having to use your browser. Much nicer.
I don't understand why we are jumping through hoops to have auto refresing JavaScript-full convoluted html webmail that interacts with some little utility in your tray. I mean, I understand the convenience of webmail, but I think that installing this is whre I would draw the line between simple & easy and flakey & klunky.
Isn't 100% easier and more smooth to interact with POP3 and your favorite email software? Maybe it's just me. I've been using a hosting service for my website and email and I guess having that much control over the set up and delivery methods has made me skeptical of free webmail in general.
100% Crunchier
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.
What I find increasingly interesting is how Microsoft's competitors-- now that it's been made clear that united states antitrust law is not going to be enforced-- are trying to get around the Microsoft OS monopoly with what amounts to shareware. Microsoft has the power to create the default configuration for the vast majority of PCs, and since traditionally few users have stepped away from the default configuration this means Microsoft has the ability to dictate many things, from what formats will gain popularity to what web standards succeed or fail. If Microsoft desires, it can install a piece of software on every new copy of Windows in the world. Those companies that are not Microsoft do not have this luxury. Some of them now appear to be circumventing this by just trying to create random pieces of "must-have" software for free and bundling the service or format that they are actually making their money from with it.
For example, iTunes. Apple needs people to have support for Quicktime; however, they have no way of making Windows users want to install Quicktime. Webpages that require Quicktime will, of course, force you to download it, but such pages would seem likely to become scarce as webmasters realize that every computer has WMP already and using WMP instead of Quicktime will not require their users to download a plugin. Apple's solution is to create a music player program for Windows that is considered by many to be the best there is, which everybody then wants to download and try out. As a process of doing this, these people inadvertently wind up installing Quicktime. End result: every computer has Quicktime already.
Google here is just another example. Google appears to be anticipating that at some point Microsoft will start using its space within the desktop to promote some engine of its own and dissuade the use of Google. Google is reacting to this by trying to get a toehold into the desktop of their own, using things such as the Google Toolbar and now, the GMail notifier. Both of these things will be installed by users for purposes largely irrelivant to Google's search-- the former for popup blocking, the latter for mail-- yet doing this means that Google builds up inertia with everyone who "just has" to download their Google tools after every system upgrade. This means that when the system update comes where Microsoft decides that every time you accidentally control-click on a word displayed on the screen it will open up Internet Explorer and search for it in MSN Search, Google can use their toehold in the desktop to undo this change and replace it with something (1) useful and (2) involving google search.
This approach hits Microsoft hard where it hurts; Microsoft is excellent at creating software. However, historically they have by and large failed at creating good software. Microsoft's strategy of destroying competitors by bundling their own special brand of mediocre with roughly equivilent functionality for "free" with the OS doesn't work anymore once people start to wind up downloading the software of Microsoft's competitors free just because it's better.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Isnt this kind of notifier common with other email service providers (yahoo and hotmail)?! So what makes it so special?
And with other email service providers beefing up the storage space, one would have thought this pre-occupation with a gigabyte email-storage would be over!
http://efil.blogspot.com/
They say they are working on it.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
Another TSR. What's one more when you have 30 I guess...
Got sushi? The Sushi FAQ
Ok, so I started with this huge happy giggle when I saw this... exactly what I've been waiting for to fully switch to gmail. I love Gmail, but currently stick to Yahoo since Y!IM will let me know when I have new mail, and that's a feature I desperately need. I considered some of the third-party equivalants, like Pop Goes the Gmail, but they rely on hacking through the website and all it takes is a change from GMail to break them.
But then I noticed that it was for Win2k/XP/2k3 only. WTF? That's great for home, but at work (where I spend most of my time), I'm stuck on Windows ME!! So now this sucks as much as it rocks. I'm sad.
Personally, I wish Google had taken my suggestion to heart: password-protected RSS feeds of your email subjects. Then anybody could write a 3rd party notifier.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
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.
Art Schools Dietzilla
That's it. My 5 invites were sucked up within 3 minutes. Thanks!
KDE/GNOME?
CPAN has GMail modules!
"The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want." - F Scott Fitzgerald
What I'd like to see is a little app to sit in the system tray and let me know when I'll get a GMail account.
I have three Google accounts. I have one super-secret account that nobody knows so I can... uh... tell people that I have a super secret account that nobody knows. I have one that's close to my real name, so I can use it for a backup for work. And I have one generic one for normal everyday use and storage.
Unfortunately, now I have three different Gmail accounts to track.
For those of you with two more Gmail accounts who haven't had a chance to try out the Gmail Notifier yet, it doesn't work for multiple accounts. You can have multiple copies running simultaneously, but it will only refer to the first one you signed in as, even though it *will* prompt you for a new username/password on the second copy you run.
If you are monitoring more than one Gmail account, what solution have you come up with?
If you click on a mailto hyperlink, while it brings you to the gmail site and creates the appropriate template, it doesn't log you in automatically (and since the toolbar has your uid and password, it should). Definately want to be able to save local too.
I don't understand why we are jumping through hoops to have auto refresing JavaScript-full convoluted html webmail that interacts with some little utility in your tray. I mean, I understand the convenience of webmail, but I think that installing this is whre I would draw the line between simple & easy and flakey & klunky.
Because it works. I use GMail at home, at work, wherever, and it just works. Works in Mozilla or IE. I didn't have to set up my own IMAP server or anything crazy like that.
Yeah, I could (and do) ssh to my home box and read my POP mail with mutt, but even with GMail's occasional brief outages that has been less reliable than just using GMail. And it wouldn't help me when I'm sitting in a boring training seesion and can't really install Cygwin on the machine ...
not One, not Two, but Many.
I just don't understand why someone would move 12 years of their life into the data warehouse of someone you don't control.
You're right. Re-read Brad Templeton's privacy concerns over Gmail and the prospect of storing the "12 years of your life into the data warehouse of someone you don't control" becomes rather dubious.
However, from a purely technical standpoint there are some real advantages to chucking your mail archives into Gmail. The search feature is second to none (who even needs labels?), the interface beats any webmail (Squirrelmail? come on!) or IMAP reader hands-down, and the conversations feature is a real bonus (Mark Lyon informs me that GMail automatically makes conversations from the messages as they are uploaded with his Gmail loader).
The bottom line is, I don't know whether to upload all my old mail to Gmail yet, and for me the jury's still out until the geeks and the lawyers agree.
---- scrm
OK, somebody explain to me what the big deal with a GMail account is. As far as I can tell it's just free webmail with 1Gb storage. Yet people are so excited about it. Why?
I mean, free webmail is everywhere. I have untold gigs of storage on my HD and unused old HDs in the closet and I have never come close to more than a meg or so of saved email (if people send me pictures I want to keep, I just detach the file and save it somewhere else).
So am I missing something here?
I can send you an invite for [puts pinky to mouth] one Million Dollars!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I am jruderman@gmail.com and I have not had Gmail invites for a month. Any particular reason you're trying to get Slashdot users to spam me?
The shareholder is always right.
That mailto handler is a pretty cool idea, I don't think I've seen that before. Is there a mailto handler for any other web based email service like Yahoo? That would be handy for my mom, who doesn't understand the whole mailto thing.
On a slightly related/unrelated note, some people here are mentioning webmail to pop conversion programs like yahoo pops and pop goes the gmail. Does anyone know if there's such a program available for everyone.net webmail users?
While Gmail Notifier DOES open a new compose window, be aware that unless you check the "keep me logged in for two weeks" checkbox on the login screen, you will have to log in every time, even if you are already logged into Gmail in another browser window.
While it's a bit cumbersom, at least it's still more secure...
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
I am waiting for eprompter(www.eprompter.com) to add GMail support. That way I get all my Yahoo, hotmail, Gmail and other web based mail accounts monitored by the same app.
The Notifier doesn't come with any options to configure. Yay! Simplicity at last!