I’ve wanted to write about this little know yet powerful freebie utility for a while now. If you are like me, you more than likely have a web-based personal e-mail account. My web-based  email flavor of choice is Google’s Gmail.

Gmail is like most free web-based email sites with a few exceptions. First, the spam filtering, it’s simply the best I have yet to see. Its simply amazing. Second, You have several options available to you for free that other services require you to pay for. Such as forwarding to another email address and even branding your gmail address with your own domain with gmail for domains (which is an entire blog post all together).

So what is Google’s Gmail notifier?

Simply put, it is a downloadable application that alerts you whenever you have new Gmail messages.  After you download the Notifier, an icon will appear in your system tray (so you don’t have to open a browser) to let you know if you have unread Gmail messages.

Once you install the Notifier, you’ll be able to:

• Automatically check for new messages every two minutes.
• See a snippet of text from up to 30 unread messages.
• Select a sound to indicate when you have new mail.
• Make Gmail your default email application.

To use the Gmail Notifier, you need Windows 2000, Windows XP, or a more recent version of Windows. (Download the Notifier*)

The Notifier is not compatible with Windows ME at this time, but Google is looking forward to offering support for more operating systems in the future.