Doron has written an excellent Firefox extension for notifying users of new Gmail and enabling them to check it with a single click. It is extremely low rent resource-wise, and simply does what it should do, no surprises or annoying side effects.

There have been rumors of Google penalizing people for using it, some by shutting their access down for 24 hours, but I personally have never experienced anything of the sort. Google has now released a beta version of their own Gmail Helper which resides in the Windows system tray, and pops up a little box when you receive mail. It works just like it should, but uses almost 10 megs of ram. Thats a pretty big chunk for such a small app.

Since it is still in beta, it is unfair to judge it as though it were a product heaved at the masses, however, I genuinely hope that Google either allows third-party extensions to work smoothly with their service or tones up their official version so that anal retentive people like myself will be willing to use it.