Google Gmail Notifier The first and most obvious application comes from Google itself.Their Gmail Notifier sits in the system tray, and displays an unread mail count, and the subject line, sender, and a synopsis of newly arriving mail. At the time of writing, it, like Gmail itself, is in beta. Get the Gmail Notifier from http://toolbar.google.com/gmail-helper/.
Mozilla Extension Gmail Notifier Technically,this will work on any platform that can run Mozilla-based browsers,but I’ll put Doron Rosenberg’s Gmail Notifier browser extension here. Although it doesn’t provide the same level of interface as a taskbar-based applica- tion,for people who spend a lot of time in their web browser,the Mozilla extension is very convenient. You can find the extension at http://nexgenmedia.net/extensions/.
Mozilla Extension Gmail Notifier Technically,this will work on any platform that can run Mozilla-based browsers,but I’ll put Doron Rosenberg’s Gmail Notifier browser extension here. Although it doesn’t provide the same level of interface as a taskbar-based applica- tion,for people who spend a lot of time in their web browser,the Mozilla extension is very convenient. You can find the extension at http://nexgenmedia.net/extensions/.
Mac OS X OS X users have a choice of two applications, both very similar to each other, and doing pretty much the same thing: placing the mail notification in the menu bar at the top of the screen.
GmailStatus Carsten Guenther’s GmailStatus (http://homepage.mac.com/carsten. guenther/GmailStatus) is a good example. It displays new mail counts for the Inbox, and each individual label you might have set up, adds a hotkey to launch Gmail in your browser, supports Growl notifications (see http://growl.info/ for more on that), and gives a hotkey to write a new message in Gmail
gCount Nathan Spindel’s gCount (www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~natan/gcount/) is very similar indeed to GmailStatus in terms of functionality, with perhaps two interesting additions. First, you can have a new mail count in the dock, and second, it takes your Gmail username and password from the keychain. This is a nice touch.
Linux, etc. People using Linux, or any other Unix-style operating system with the option to compile things, have a whole series of potential Gmail applications to choose from. Linux users will also find the scripting done in the later stages of this book to be very simple to implement.
Mail Notification Jean-Yves Lefort’s Mail Notification system for Linux desktops supports Gmail as well as most of the other common e-mail systems.You can get it from www.nongnu.org/mailnotify/ where it is released under the GPL. According to Lefort, it works with system trays implementing the freedesktop.org System Tray Specification, such as the Gnome Panel Notification Area, the Xfce Notification Area, and the KDE System Tray.
Wmgmail Remarkably useful for the clarity of its Python-based code, Pasi Savolainen’s Wmgmail is intended for use with WindowMaker or fluxbox window managers on the operating system of your choice. (If that sentence means nothing to you, this is not for you, in other words.) It’s a standard new mail notification app, with new mail preview added in, but it also has one very nice feature that is perfect for the hacker: You can set it to run another program whenever new mail arrives. You can find Wmgmail at http://osx.freshmeat.net/projects/wmgmail/.
Redirecting mailto: Now that you have your desktop telling you when you have new mail within your Gmail account, the only remaining integration is to ensure that clicking on a mailto: link on a web page opens Gmail instead of your operating system’s default e-mail client.
Windows Again, as with new mail notification,Windows users have the pick of the crop. The Google-authored Gmail Notifier, as mentioned previously, gives you the option to redirect mailto: links when you install it. If you really want to, you can manually edit the Windows Registry to enact the same effect.The website www.rabidsquirrel.net/G-Mailto/ gives a rundown of just how to do this.
Multiplatform/Mozilla Other than the Mozilla extension, at the time of this writing there is no mailto: link diversion for the Linux desktop. But happily, by far the best way of repurpos- ing mailto: links is to do it in the browser, and specifically in a Mozilla-based browser, which runs on all of the platforms used in this book: Windows, OS X, and Linux.The platforms can use Jed Brown’s WebMailCompose extension, installable from http://jedbrown.net/mozilla/extensions/#WebMailCompose.
This extension also allows mailto: links to point to many other web-based e-mail systems, should you tire of all of this coolness.
OS X GmailStatus, mentioned earlier, also has the effect of changing mailto: links to launch Gmail instead of Mail.app. But if you don’t want to use GmailStatus, a good example for OS X users is Gmailto, found at http://gu.st/code/ Gmailto/. Gmailto is simple to use: Just download and run it, and then go to Mail.app’s preference panel to change the default reader application to Gmailto instead of Mail.app.Why the preference panel is inside the application you no longer wish to use is beyond the reckoning of mortal men.
GmailerXP Well worth its own section, if only because it’s really weird, the Windows software GmailerXP—http://gmailerxp.sourceforge.net—does all of the above but adds in a desktop version of all of the other Gmail features as well: labels, stars, setting filters and contacts, and so on . I’m not sure when you would use it, but it is a brilliant example of a Gmail hack. The second half of this book looks at how applications such as GmailerXP work and how to make your own.
