If you are one of those, who gets a lot of emails very often to your Gmail account, then you should start using Gmail Notifier. Gmail notifier automates the process of checking if any new messages or mails are in your Gmail account. This is done every two minutes and you have an option to set sound indicator if any new mails or messages arrive.
If you use various email services and if Gmail is your primary email, you can with the help of Gmail Notifier set Gmail as your default email application.
Another cool feature of Gmail Notifier is that it has an inbuilt preview tool. This means that you do not have to login to your Gmail account to read the unread messages. You can preview the content from right within the Gmail Notifier. You can read the snippets of up to 30 latest, unread messages, this is the only limit.
It is a small downloadable application, which when downloaded and installed will sit in your system tray.
To run Gmail Notifier, you should either have Windows 2000, Windows XP or Vista. The limitations are that it is not compatible with Windows ME and it supports English only for now.
If you are using Gmail Notifier on MAC, then there are some additional features like you can see create new calendar events and also see upcoming events that you would have marked in your calendar. You need to have OS X 10.3.8+ for Gmail Notifier to work on MAC.
@Aery – True being logged in to gTalk is another option. Advantages of this desktop application is, you can preview upto 30 messages and ofcourse one doesn’t need to be logged into GTalk 🙂 .
gtalks does this automatically for me.