Free Penguin download - Gmail Notify
32 bit deb for Ubuntu
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64 bit deb for Ubuntu
deb for Debian
Gmail Notifier, an official tool offered by Google, displays a small icon in the notification area (see Taskbar) in Microsoft Windows and on the right-hand side of the menu bar in Mac OS X, indicating the presence of new mail in one's inbox.
It also has a feature that makes Gmail the default mail client for mailto links.
It does not, however, download new messages. For Linux, several unofficial notifiers are available.
It should be noted that currently the Gmail Notifier (v1.0.25.0) does not work with Google Apps For Your Domain. Gmail , officially Google Mail in Germany and the United Kingdom, is a free Web-based email (webmail), POP3 and IMAP e-mail service provided by Google.On April 1, 2004 the product began as an invitation-only beta release.
On February 7, 2007 the beta version was opened to the general public.
With an initial storage capacity of 1 GB, it drastically increased the standard for free storage. Gmail currently offers over 6500 MB of free storage (increasing approximately 3.348 MB daily), with an additional 10 GB available for US$20 per year.
It has a search-oriented interface and a 'conversation view' similar to an internet forum.
Gmail is well-known for its use of the Ajax programming technique in its design, and has tens of millions of users. The service currently provides more than 6500 MB of free storage[10] and paid additional storage from 10 GB (US$20/year) up to 400 GB (US$500/year), shared over Picasa Web Albums and Gmail.
The increase from 1 GB was announced on April 1, 2005 and was made for the first anniversary of Gmail. The announcement was accompanied by a statement that Google would "keep giving people more space forever".All Google says about this now is that it will keep increasing storage by the second as long as they have enough space on their servers.
On 12 October 2007, Google ramped up the storage counter to 5.37 MB per hour.
Approximately a week later, the counter went back down to 1.12 MB per hour.
From 4 January 2008, the counter went down to about 3.35 MB per day. On August 9, 2007, some users of Gmail reported that their storage capacity had been increased to 9030 MB (8.8 GB).
The 9030 MB of space is an over-all total of all the users' storage space(s) within a Google Account, including Picasa Web Albums.
This development seemed to occur about the same time that Google began allowing purchasable Picasa storage. In other words, Google has shared storage space, supporting both pictures and email. Gmail makes use of Ajax (specifically, the AjaXSLT framework), employing modern browser features such as JavaScript, keyboard access keys and Web feed integration. Advanced search strings can be constructed, using either the Advanced Search interface, or search operators in the search box.
Search options include search for phrases, message sender, message location and message date.
There are also undocumented search operators like "language:russian" that can be helpful. Filters can also be run by using an interface similar to the Search Options dialog (see searching below). Gmail allows users to filter messages by their text; by their From, To, and Subject fields; and by whether or not the message has an attachment. Gmail can perform any combination of the following actions upon a message that meets a label's criteria: Archiving (i.e. removing the message from the Inbox), marking as "starred", applying a label, moving to the trash, and forwarding to another e-mail address. Gmail recognizes related messages and groups them into "conversations" where associated messages are listed one after another, with the newest messages at the bottom.
If a conversation has more than approximately 100 messages, it splits into separate sections.
There have been reports of emails not from the same conversation being mistakenly joined into one conversation, and conversations splitting up. To organize messages further, e-mails can be labeled.
Labels give users a flexible method of categorizing e-mails since an e-mail may have any number of labels (in contrast to a system in which an e-mail may belong to only one folder). Users can display all e-mails having a particular label and can use labels as a search criterion.
In addition, important e-mails can be flagged with a star (as mentioned earlier) so that a user may find an important e-mail more quickly than searching through the entire inbox. Unlike other email Web clients, Gmail doesn't permit users to see an email message's size or to sort email (for example, alphabetically by subject). Gmail automatically saves contact details when e-mails are sent to an unknown recipient.
If the user changes, adds, or removes information near an e-mail such as the name while sending any e-mail, it also updates that in the contact list, unless the user is using basic HTML view, designed for people with slower internet connections or browsers that do not support AJAX.
When a user starts typing in the To, CC or BCC fields it brings up a list with the relevant contacts, with their name and primary e-mail address. More information, including alternate email addresses, can be added on the Contacts page. These contacts can also be added to a group, which makes sending multiple e-mails to related contacts easier.
Images can be added to contacts, which will appear whenever the mouse is over the contact's name. Contacts can be imported in several different ways, from Microsoft Office Outlook, Eudora, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, orkut, and any other contact list capable of being exported as a CSV file.
Gmail also allows a user to export their contacts to CSV. A year after Gmail was announced, Rich Text Formatting was introduced, which allows the font size, color and text-alignment to be customized, as well as the embedding of bullet points and numbered lists. Autosave is another feature in Gmail — a system for avoiding loss of data in case of a browser crash or other error.
When composing an e-mail, a draft copy of the message and any attachments are saved automatically.
Although messages begin to be saved once a minute, saving times vary depending on the size of the message. Gmail places the cursor above quoted text when replying, which encourages top-posting. Regardless of how a received message is formatted, Gmail's conversation view defaults to showing only unique content, in chronological order, making posting style irrelevant to the Gmail user. By default, Gmail uses an unencrypted connection to retrieve user data, encrypting only the connection used for the login page.
However, by changing the URL from http://mail.google.com/mail/ to https://mail.google.com/mail/, Gmail can be told to use a secure connection, reducing the risk of third-party eavesdropping on users' information, such as emails and contacts, which are transmitted in plaintext as JavaScript data in the page source code.
POP3 and IMAP access uses Transport Layer Security, or TLS. Although TLS is used when one sends email via an email client such as Mozilla Thunderbird, it is not used when the email is sent from the Gmail servers to the destination domain's mail exchangers, unless supported, so at some stage the user's email message may still be transmitted in unencrypted plain text. Gmail offers a spam filtering system.
According to Gmail, messages marked as spam are automatically deleted after 30 days, but there have been reports on Gmail Help Discussion of spam mails staying in the spam folder for months.
However, Gmail has now fixed this problem.
The spam filtering system cannot be disabled.
POP3 users need to check their Spam folder manually via the web interface as only emails sent to the Inbox can be retrieved via POP3. IP addresses of Gmail users are disguised in order to protect security. All incoming and outgoing e-mails are automatically scanned for viruses in e-mail attachments.
If a virus is found on an attachment the reader is trying to open, Gmail will try to remove the virus and open the cleaned attachment.
Gmail also scans all outgoing attachments and will prevent the message from being sent if a virus is found.
Executable files are automatically blocked by the Anti-Virus system.
However, some viruses have been known to hide from the scanner and have infiltrated many e-mails.
Gmail also does not allow users to send or receive executable files or archives containing executable files. Gmail is also one of the first major e-mail providers to sign outgoing mails with Yahoo!'s DomainKeys signatures. In the past, Gmail has had severe trouble with security which allowed a full account compromise via Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities affecting the Google.com homepage or information disclosure through a file which was stored on Google's server and included all the Email contacts of the currently logged in user.
Messages can be sent to addresses in the format username+extratext@gmail.com, where extratext can be any string, and will arrive in the inbox of username@gmail.com.
This allows users to sign up for different services with different aliases and then easily filter all e-mails from those services.
In addition, should users start to receive spam messages that are directed to their e-mail address with the extra text, they will know what services have leaked out their e-mail address to others.
However, some websites do not accept email addresses containing plus signs,despite the '+' symbol being part of the mail address specification. Gmail allows the user to add other email accounts to be used as optional sender addresses on outgoing email.
A verification process is performed to confirm the user's ownership of each email address before it is added. "Plus-addresses" can also be added as sender addresses in a similar way.
Moreover, any of the additional addresses can be set as the default address. When using this feature, the address chosen will appear in the "From:" field of the email. However, the Gmail account used to actually send the message is easily seen, as it either appears on a "Sender:" field in the email header, or in the message's subject field.
Some mail clients will write "From: Sender@gmail.com [mailto:Sender@gmail.com] On Behalf Of..." upon reply, making it very obvious. Optionally, a different "Reply-to:" address can be set for each "send as" address. Gmail doesn't recognize dots as characters within a username.
Instead, it will ignore all dots in a username.
For instance, the account google@gmail.com receives mail sent to goo.gle@gmail.com, g.o.o.g.l.e@gmail.com, etc. Likewise, the account goo.gle@gmail.com receives mail sent to google@gmail.com.
This can be useful in setting filters for incoming mail. However, when signing in, it is necessary to include any dots used in the creation of the account. Also note that this does not work in Google Apps for Your Domain.
In Apps, each username variation must be entered as a nickname by the domain administrator. In addition to adding extra email addresses, Gmail has a feature called "Mail Fetcher" that allows users to add up to five additional accounts to retrieve mail from via POP3.
Once accounts are added, the user is asked if they want to create a custom sender address (see above) automatically if they have not yet done so manually.
This feature does not support retrieving mail from IMAP servers, nor does it support sending messages through an external SMTP server. Google Talk, Google's service for instant messaging, can be accessed through a web based interface on Gmail's site.
The web based interface is able to support voice calling and voice messages if the Google Talk client is running in the background.
All messages are archived to the Chats mailbox in Gmail unless 'Off the Record' is enabled in Google Talk.
If the fellow chatter suddenly has to go offline, any and all further messages sent will be delivered to that person via e-mail, including in it the entire conversation had previously.
Another Google Talk integration feature is voicemail, where the message is sent to the recipient's Gmail inbox;
as well as synchronizing contact pictures.
On December 4, 2007, the company announced integration with AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), allowing Gmail users to login to their AIM accounts and send instant messages to and see the online status of AIM users. Google Calendar offered Gmail integration soon after it was announced on April 13, 2006.
Events can be added while writing a message that get stored on the main Calendar interface.
Recipients who use Gmail will then receive an invitation to the event, which they can accept or decline. Furthermore, Gmail attempts to recognize event dates and locations within e-mails, and gives users the option to add the event to a calendar, similar to Microsoft's Exchange Server. Further integration is offered with some other Google products. Documents, spreadsheets and presentations can be opened using Google Docs, without downloading the file to a hard disk first.
Also, pictures can be sent directly from Picasa using a Gmail account. Gmail's old code will run on any computer with one of these supported browsers: Internet Explorer 5.5+, Mozilla Application Suite 1.4+, Firefox 0.8+, Safari 1.2.1+, K-Meleon 0.9+, Netscape 7.1+, Opera 9+. It works well in the AOL 9.0 browser, but may have problems with earlier AOL browser versions.
Although officially unsupported, it also works in Konqueror when the browser identifies itself as Firefox 1.5+. However, the new code has more stringent requirements;
users must upgrade their browsers to Firefox 2.0 or Internet Explorer 7.
This can be a minor issue for some users, as several new features are available only in Gmail's newer version.
Google has included a note at the top of several help pages, reiterating this differentiation between the two versions of the code: AIM, colored labels, group chat, and rich emoticons only work in the latest version of Gmail, currently available for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2. Please upgrade your browser to take advantage of these new features. —Various Gmail Help Center articles. Gmail also offers "Basic HTML view" to allow users to access the Gmail messages from almost any computer running browsers that do not fully support the more advanced features, such as Internet Explorer 4.0+, Netscape 4.07+ or Opera 6.03+, or users with JavaScript disabled.
Gmail's Help Center provides a list of fully supported browsers.
Gmail has recently also become available as a downloadable application for mobile phones as well as WAP-enabled mobile phones.
It also works on the PSP and PS3, Nintendo Wii's Internet Channel and Nintendo DS Browser web browsers but is not fully supported. Google has developed several smaller applications, with attempts to increase user productivity, expand into business sectors and making Gmail available on mobile devices. On February 10, 2006, Google introduced Gmail For Your Domain.
All companies who participated in the beta testing were allowed to use Gmail through their own domain.
Since then, Google has developed Google Apps, which includes customizable versions of Google Calendar, Google Page Creator and more. With various editions available, it targets enterprises as well as small businesses. On November 2, 2006, Google began offering a mobile-application based version of its Gmail product for mobile phones capable of running Java applications.
Those interested in using the application can download it from gmail.com/app directly from their mobile phone.
In addition, Sprint Nextel announced separately that it would make the application available from its Vision and Power Vision homepages and which will be preloaded onto some new Sprint phones.
The application gives Gmail its own custom menu system, which is much easier to navigate than a Web-based application would be on a cell phone. Gmail's message threading also shows up clearly, and the site displays attachments (like photos, Word documents) in the application. Google Apps Partner Edition is a service targeted at ISPs and portals that provides brand-customizable Gmail accounts, along with other Google services (such as Calendar and Docs).
For example, users of Sky Broadband access their @sky.com emails from a customized Gmail interface with 10 GB of storage space.
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