The Official Gmail Notifier

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August 22, 2004

At first there was the Gmail Notifier extension for Firefox. And there was the GMailCompose extension for Firefox (made defunct by the WebMailCompose extension). The first displayed an email notification message in Firefox. The second allowed you to have all mailto: links you click automatically send you to a page to compose the email in Gmail. There was also GTray.

And then there now is the official Gmail Notifier from Google. Purely for Windows, it appears unobtrusively in your system tray when installed.

New message notifications appear as a transclucent pane in the bottom right of your screen. (The icon does look a little cutesy doesn’t it?)

There’s not much more you can do with it.

It’s nice to have an official tool from Google that does what all those other homegrown tools do. It’s also interesting that Google seems to have incorporated the best of all these amazing tools in their app - mail notification and mailto: link manipulation. Thumbs up to the authors of those neat little tools! Google seems to be copying your ideas!

Posted by Chu Yeow at August 22, 2004 SGT |

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| Category: Mozilla, Neat Stuff

6 Comments & TrackBacks ()

Congratulations to Jed and Doron for coming up with a cross-platform solution that is more configurable. If Gmail really wants to do the right thing, they’d give Doron an API to call instead of forcing him to scrape.

Posted by: alanjstr on August 22, 2004 4am

I think its great that Google has created an official tool for this purpose, but it would be great if they could intergrate it into the Google toolbar - it would make perfect sense, really. I wonder if the Mozilla googlebar team are considering adding a gmail checker - it would be good if there was a publicly available API for these tools.

Posted by: alsotop on August 22, 2004 7am

At first glance I thought Google’s official Gmail Notifier was great. That is, until I tried to get it working for multiple user accounts on Windows XP. I’m looking forward to Google polishing things up a bit, because this app will be pretty darn cool!

Posted by: Bernie Zimmermann on August 22, 2004 8am