Just before the trumpets sounded and the Google went public, a beta product was released for GMail notifications on Windows. GMail decided to release its’ own system tray notification utility into the already crowded notification category. What does this mean? I dunno… The software works and does not require the .Net framework but it is simplistic.

Gmail Notifier operates by reading your existing GMail login cookie and therefore does not offer a dialog to enter your credentials. It does provide a view of your Inbox and the system tray icon is pretty cool - a couple of googlie eyes.

Does this spell the end of third-party notification programs? While certainly possible, I suspect that this will simply act to speed innovation within the category. It doesn’t take much to offer additional value. The first thing that comes to my mind is multiple mailbox support whether that means support for multiple GMail accounts (specifically forbidden by the GMail TOS) or other email providers in addition to GMail. Google has no reason to include such a feature while others have and will continue to do so in the future.

GMail Notifier does have a few things going for it though:

* It is a Google product and therefore GMail’s adoption should track fairly consistently with Notifiers adoption.
* It’s not based on the .Net framework and its memory footprint is therefore much smaller

Things not going for it:

* Notifier does not offer a user-settable mail-check interval. What is the interval? I’m betting 5 minutes but I have not done any research.

Try it out and tell me what you think.

Operating System: Windows 2000+

Source: GMail Notifier
FAQ: GMail Notifier FAQ