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.
Sadly this needs a lot of perl modules, which make packagers life hard because before building this simple package you have to do a lot of work for the deps.
The xfce4-mailwatch-plugin provides the same functionality if you're using xfce. KDE probably has it's own thing too I guess. There is also gkrellm for everything else.
If you're using firefox, there are probably a dozen plugins for that too.
I think I'm gonna stick with Claws Mail, it's a good program. I've only one issue with it: new messages are marked as unread, not as new, so the system tray icon doesn't change its colour (http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/claws-mai ... gi?id=2451). Maybe I can try to compile Sylpheed
