If you’ve been tinkering with Gmail but haven’t made a full-scale switch to it, this handy little application may be just enough to push you over the edge. GTray allows you to combine the portability and storage capacity of Gmail with the frequent alerts of a typical e-mail client.

After installing, GTray will check your Gmail account after a prescribed time period while sitting quietly in your system tray. If there’s unread e-mail, a small balloon will alert you. If you stay logged in to your Gmail account, clicking this balloon will take you directly into your inbox. If you use XP’s fast user switching, it even shows your account has unread e-mail from the login menu.

I’m still not sold on the whole Gmail concept just yet, but I’m glad to have this so that I no longer have to worry about logging in to my account throughout the day. My thanks go out to Cody Rester for pointing out this little time-saver.

Update: About two minutes after publishing this, I ran across this on SlashDot.