In these days when everyone has one or more smartphones, nobody really has to check the GMail website in a web browser and check for the messages. Notifications for new email messages appear in your smartphone just like you receive an SMS message. This has made things very easy for email users, but it has also made them indolent about accessing the email messages in the web browser. But you cannot keep staring at your smartphone or tablet all the time, especially when you are at work and busy working on some project. In these scenarios, a free utility called Spiffy can turn out to be very useful as it can display you instant notifications in the Windows system tray as soon as you receive new email messages in your GMail accounts.
Spiffy is free and lightweight GMail notification utility for Windows. It is very small in size and comes in form of an installer. It requires you to have .NET 4.0 framework installed in Windows. After the installation, the first thing you have to do is add your GMail account to Spiffy. To do this, you have to right-click on the Spiffy icon in the system tray and select Accounts from the right-click menu.
This would open the Accounts management window that allows you to add up to five different GMail accounts. For each account, you have to add an account name to identify it, username, password, whether you are using it via Google Apps on a different domain, the time frequency for checking the email account, custom sound alert that is played when new email messages are detected and so on.
After you have added one or more of your GMail accounts, you will start receiving the notifications through Spiffy about new email messages. You can either wait for the time period that you have set for checking for new messages, or you can right-click on the Spiffy system tray icon and select Check Now from the menu. Either way, it will show you new message notifications in the system tray. You can click on one of these messages in the notification to open the full GMail website and read the complete message.
In the Spiffy settings, you can choose to run it automatically at Windows startup, choose the time for which alerts are displayed in the notification area, choose custom alert sounds, choose custom alert icon, choose window transparency color, set a proxy server to access GMail (if your office network is blocking GMail), choose a custom web browser to open GMail and more.
Conclusion: Spiffy makes it easy to check email messages on your GMail accounts. You can add up to five different GMail accounts and check them all simultaneously for new messages. Alerts for new messages are shown in the system tray of Windows. It is very lightweight and does not consume many of your system resources.
You can download Spiffy from http://members.multiweb.nl/kevin/spiffy/.