Gmail Notifier for Ubuntu

CheckGmail is an alternative Gmail Notifier for Linux and other *nix systems. It is fast, secure and uses minimal bandwidth via the use of Atom feeds.

CheckGmail is a system tray application that checks a Gmail account for new mail. When new mail is present the tray icon changes, an optional animated popup is displayed and a tooltip displays the number and details of new messages. Each message can be opened directly in a browser window, and many common Gmail operations (marking as read, archiving, deleting or reporting as spam) can be carried out on messages directly within CheckGmail, without the need to use the Gmail web interface.

Installing checkgmail in Ubuntu

For Ubuntu Dapper Users

Add this repository in Ubuntu Dapper

You need to edit the source list file and add the following lines

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://asher256-repository.tuxfamily.org dapper main dupdate french
deb http://asher256-repository.tuxfamily.org ubuntu main dupdate french

Save the changes and exit

You need to update source list using the following command

sudo apt-get update

Install checkgmail using the following command

sudo apt-get install checkgmail

For Ubuntu Edgy Users

CheckGmail is now part of the Ubuntu Universe packages. Therefore make sure you add Universe repositories into your sources.list file

Install checkgmail using the following command

sudo apt-get install checkgmail

This will complete the installation part and now you need to run the application for this you need to press Alt+F2 you should see the following screen

Now you need to click on “Run with file” you should see the following screen here you need to select your checkgmail from /usr/bin/checkgmail and click ok

Once you select the checkgmail application you can see the following screen and click on “Run”

Now you should see the following screen here you need to select your gmail account details,how frequency you want to check your gmail,gmail system tray option etc and click ok

Here is the example how you can see the gmail notifier once you receive an email in your gmail account

Now you need to run your application after restarting for this you need to go to System—>Preferences—>Sessions

You should see the following screen and here you need to click on “Add”

Now you should see the following screen here you need to click on “Browse”


Here you need to select your checkgmail application from /usr/bin/checkgmail and click on open

Now you can see the following screen once you select your application and click ok


That’s it now your checkgmail application will be starting whenever you start your system

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28 thoughts on “Gmail Notifier for Ubuntu

  1. Just wanted to say thanks for the info. For someone making the leap into Linux, this was a good starting point in a number of ways.

  2. I also wanted to thank you for this clear set of instructions. Easy as pie, no redundant explanation.

  3. Thank you for this very useful program. I was using a different checker, but yours is better. 🙂 I like your instructions; they’re very easy to understand.

  4. Excellent! Thanks for the great instructions… even I can follow! I tried others before (the Ubuntu Starterguide) but they were not as well written as yours! Thanks for your time & efforts to share these!!!

  5. Thanks so much for the guide.
    As #2 said, the guide was helpful to me in a number of ways as a new ubuntu user!

  6. Very nice indeed.

    However, I can not log into my gmail account since the message goes something like ‘not correct username or password’.

    What could be wrong?

    P.S. Ubuntu 8.04

  7. The same problem over here. A few weeks ago didn’t had this problem, even though then, like now, I used Ubuntu 8.04
    Is there an update?

  8. Hi – Excellent set of instructions! I wish the entire Linux community would learn to publish useful instructions like these.
    Kudos to you!

  9. I have the same problem as mentioned by other users, “Incorrect username or password”. How can this be fixed?

  10. For those who have problem with incorrect username/password… try excluding @gmail.com from the username

  11. Still i have the problem 🙁 incorrect user name and password.. I tried without @gmail.com part but still it doesn’t work..

  12. Guys, what happened? Running Jaunty and it is a no go here.

    Incorrect username and password. And I know they are correct. Same for username w/ @gmail.com and without. Come on! This is so much better than the other applets out there… but they work!

  13. Actually, problem for people who know their credentials are correct is that this program is poorly written. Those of us whose passwords are very strong strings, which include what are escape characters will fail. I am not sure if it is a failure to HTML entity encode, or the language of the string handler in the applet, but when I changed my password to not use the ‘ character , everything worked again.

  14. I was having the same problem suddenly with the login system and my password isn’t overly complex. The -no_cookies option did the trick, thanks!

  15. checkgmail -no_cookies is compulsory for Jaunty, doesn’t work without it, thanks Joe & thanks to the author 🙂

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