Googlemail offers a huge amount of storage space and the power of Google search for finding emails but webmail accounts have some disadvantages. The greatest of these is getting notifications of when new emails have arrived.

One solution is to access Googlemail with an email program like Thunderbird or Outlook Express but this means downloading the emails, potentially a problem at work if there are large attachments.

Instead, GmailAssistant is a Java program that shows an alert above the Notification Area whenever a new email arrives.

As it is Java based, there is no installation wizard to follow and should work with any Java-supporting operating system. To use, simply unzip the download file and then double click on the GmailAssistant file. We did have a problem on a computer with the Nokia phone software installed, but this is not a problem with GmailAssistant but with the file associations.

Setup is simple, just add the username and password for the account and select the kind of emails to set alerts. As well as the alerts it can play a chime and/or flash the NumLock light.