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."

How long....

[avalys]

How long until someone reverse-engineers this API and makes an OS X and Linux client available?

So when do we get Gmessenger?

[silverbyte]

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?

percentage

[kc0re]

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.

skins

[Texodore]

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.

What about Linux?

[jbash]

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?

Re:new mail notification sound

[kzinti]

And it's been mentioned before, but I still think the Gmail Loader is still a handy utility.

Does the Gmail Loader still have the limitation that the date that appears on any uploaded e-mail in Gmail is the date of its upload, not the date of its original sending? If not (and I don't see how it could, as that problem must lie on the Gmail side), then it's hardly worth using. What's the point of uploading twelve years of e-mail to Gmail if you can't tell it "Show me all mail from March of 1996" and get the right answer?

Importing mail from past archives is a big item on my wish list for Gmail. The Gmail Loader is a huge step in that direction, but until Google fixes the date problem, it doesn't do me any good.

And for autohiders?

[judmarc]

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....

Re:percentage

[Lieutenant_Dan]

Oh God, are you wrong. And that's certainly your right.

The breakdown of people using Gmail will be close to the same breakdown of the fools using their blogs or regular folks using their search engine.

Here's [google.ca] your small percentage of Linux users.

Re:No point?

[Anonymous Coward]

The mailto: handler alone makes it worthwhile.

5 invites

[Capt_Troy]

I have 5 invites if anyone wants one. email me at tfandango_@_gmail_._com (remove the _s).

-troy

Re:Why such a big fuss?

[bookemdano63]

The gmail search and threading interface is the best I have seen.
I am currently using 1% of my gigabyte.

This is awesome! This sucks!

[Randolpho]

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 [jaybe.org], 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.

what about something for Freedesktops?

[xutopia]

KDE/GNOME?

You insensitive clod!

[Anonymous Coward]

You need 2 accounts for this one to work

Just rub it in our faces that you have two freaking accounts while many of us languish in Gmail-less-ness!

Re:new mail notification sound

[Solder Fumes]

Can anyone explain to me what the point is of moving all your personal email into someone else's free service? I could have gotten a Gmail account by now, but I don't need it. Domain names are cheap, web hosting+email is cheap, hard disk space is cheap, my email archives are irreplacable. I have my own email domain, and I can store hundreds of gigs of email if I really have to. If I need to get to my archives from somewhere else, I can always SSH into my network. Maybe Google lets you search easily, but all you really need is a better indexer for your local email archives. I just don't understand why someone would move 12 years of their life into the data warehouse of someone you don't control. Their handling of their stock offering certainly doesn't inspire confidence. Maybe Google really messes up and they get shut down tomorrow. You never know.

Because it works

[cascadingstylesheet]

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 ...

Re:new mail notification sound

[kzinti]

I like the idea of having all my mail - ever - indexed, searchable, available through the Internet, without having to manage the infrastructure myself. I have a setup similar to what you describe. I ssh into my site. Redirect an IMAP and SMTP port, and voila - I can read my mail from anywhere. I'm experimenting with the idea of Google Mail as an alternative that I don't have to manage myself.

My e-mail, too, is irreplaceable. I regard it as among the most precious of my data. I would never trust Gmail to be my only copy of anything, for a variety of reasons. But it would be nice to upload my old e-mail to it, mirror my new e-mail to it (or vice-versa), and have a nice searchable backup that I can get to from anywhere.

I don't get it

[HeyLaughingBoy]

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?

mailto handler

[hiroshi912681]

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?

Waiting for eprompter

[data64]

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.