When I logged in today to my GMail account, I immediately noticed the message as shown on the screenshot below saying, “Click here to enable desktop notifications for Gmail.”
This Gmail desktop notification is a new feature rolled out by Google that let the Gmail users know when there is new email or chat message. A pop-up will show everytime you have new email or chat message. However, it is only available to Google Chrome users and it should be enabled in the settings.
How to enable or disable the Gmail desktop notification feature of Gmail?
Just follow the instruction below in enabling the funtionality:
- Click the Settings link in the upper-right corner of Gmail.
- On the General tab, select the option you’d like in the Desktop Notifications section. You’ll be able to turn Chat notifications on or off, and can also choose to turn email notifications off, receive notifications for all incoming email, or only those Gmail marks ‘important’.
- Click Save.
But if you saw the message as shown on the screenshot above, if you’ll click the “Click here to enable” the notification for chat is the one being enabled. So, you still need to visit the setting page and click the radio button for the enable new email notification to activate it.
That’s it.
By the way, Google posted a blogpost about it. And the pop-up is shown like this:
How useful is this Gmail notification feature?
I think it’s useful if you are really waiting for an email or chat message from someone while browsing other websites or working for anything. But I think, the tab for the Gmail website should be there opened in the background.