GMailNotifier
A simple application for Smartphone that can check how many new messages you have in your Google Mail [google.com] account (supports Google Apps [google.com] domains, just type in a domain in the Settings… screen). It uses the ATOM feed for your inbox to find new messages. This is a proof-of-concept, ideally the next step is to integrate this into the home screen (anyone?). For now, it cheats and uses an all-day event to put the data on the home screen. Just leave this app running in the background and it will update your mail count at the selected interval.
Why did Microsoft not provide an easier way to plug into the home screen? Making a plug in in C++ would be a lot more complicated than this, .NET makes it a lot easier to do SSL requests. If you look at the code, I tried making it update the form’s icon, hoping this would show up in the MRU, but it does not (maybe there is a way?). But, for now, the all-day event works. If you use GMobileSync, I suggest quitting the GMailNotifier before syncing (the all-day event gets deleted when exiting).
I wrote this, because I couldn’t find anything out there that did what I want. There is another app out there that is similar from JGADesign: GMailCheck [jgadesign.net].
Version 0.2 adds the ability to set the mail check interval and also a summary of email in the all-day event that gets created.
Version 0.3 fixes parsing of preview emails to process html entities.
