Emails are a great tool to deliver messages and electronic attachments. Actually, when email began to spread more aggressively, all the post offices in the world registered a profit decrease as people gave up the traditional way of sending their letters.

All there was needed was creating an account, selecting a user ID and a password and that was it. You had instant access (well it very much depended on your Internet connection) to your email box and you could check all the messages, including the sent ones. One nagging limitation was the maximum storage room that was pretty limited (I remember that you could at one moment store only 8MB of messages on the mail servers).

However, given the traffic of email on the servers it was more than enough for some of the users (my friends and I used to joggle with five or six email accounts to make up for the necessary space). Nowadays, competition pushed the great players on the email market (Microsoft, Yahoo and Google) to suddenly increase the size of the mail box. My Gmail account is currently 2796MB large, which is pretty much for me, as only 40% of this size is occupied.

Together with the expansion of email messaging, it was time for a more real time communication and the IM (Instant Messaging) was born. This allowed users all over the world to communicate almost instantly. Of course, the link between the two messaging services was only logical and all users could check their mail box through their IM software. Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk, they all give you access to your mail box via the IM application.

Google Talk - although a great application - failed to take the market and has the fewest users. So Google took another way to gain users. They created GMail Notifier, a free application that allows you to check your Google email account instantly. Of course, the basic condition is to have a Google Mail account.

The little program integrates perfectly in your Windows shell and after installation it will nest in the system tray and wait for your inbox to fill up. As its name suggests, all it does is notify the users about the incoming emails in the GMail account.

During the installation, the user can choose the type of the install and select the optional components you want to be added: Run on startup and Use for outgoing mail (use GMail to send mail from mailto: links on the web).

Immediately after the installation, the user will have to provide the necessary information to authenticate and pinpoint the account on the server. The ease of use and the low complexity level will require typing in the username and the password of your account.

I was supposed to talk about the interface now, but due to the fact that there is not such a thing in this case, I will skip directly to the options. The only option available is choosing the web browser you want the account to be opened into. The application automatically detects some of the browsers installed and will present the choices. In my case, the web browsers displayed are Internet Explorer, Maxthon Browser and Mozilla Firefox. I also had Avant browser installed on my machine, but GMail Notifier failed to detect it.

Right clicking the little blue icon in the system tray will display a context menu that enables the user to go to the mail account on the spot (it will be opened in the browser selected in the options menu) or check the mail right away. "Tell me again" option will re-list the emails in your inbox.

The received emails will be displayed in the right side of your desktop and will contain some information about the currently shown message. Thus, the subject is displayed together with the reference number of the email in your inbox section of the account. If the email has been received on the current day then the hour will also be shown.

In case of Internet connection failure the little icon will have a blue exclamation mark on it and an error message will also be displayed, saying that an error is preventing GMail Notifier from retrieving the emails in your account.

The Good

Small, easy to use and to configure. The icon will be shown in the system tray and the messages will be shown in the right corner of your desktop.

The Bad

Some of my friends said that the missing feature is the sound notification changing. Others that it does not store the messages on the computer like Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird. I say that these observations are not solid and that the only disturbing activity of the application is the RAM usage (8MB). But even this is not such a big baddie nowadays.

The Truth

It is a notifier and this is what it does. It works nice and smooth and does a great job.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: