Productivity Sauce

On the face of it, Google Mail Checker Plus (GMCP) looks like just another Chrome extension that displays unread email count. But dig deeper and you'll discover that this extension offers a handful of genuinely useful features that make it a must-have utility for any Gmail user. For starters, GMCP sports the ability to display desktop notifications, so you can be notified about incoming emails even with Chrome running in the background. You can use the notification window not only to preview each new message, but also archive, delete, and mark it as spam.

GMCP's options page offers other useful options for you to tweak. Here you can change polling interval, configure GMCP for use with Gmail on your domain, choose a different icon set, and much more. Although most of the available options here are self-explanatory, you can get a brief explanation of each option by hovering the mouse over the question mark next to each option.