Most of us who like to use and check Flickr for beautiful photos have Yahoo! Mail accounts that are most likely not Plus accounts, so we have to check for mail the old way, which can become cumbersome and counter-productive. There are desktop workarounds (for Mac even) that may work, as well as mobile mail checkers, like the iOS Mail app, but for integrated solutions in Chrome, there are limited extensions.

Now that Chrome has desktop notifications, mail checkers for multiple webmail services are most welcome. X-Notifier is the Chrome (and Opera which supports extensions now!) version of the ultra-powerful, multiple mail checker, Webmail Notifier. This gem of an app is the perfect mail checker extension in this author’s book, and is available as an extension and as a web app.

Set Up Multiple Accounts Of The Same Service

Once you install the app, you can head to the Options page to type in your account credentials (for Yahoo! Mail, just the username and password).

You can give your Yahoo account, or any other account for that matter, a nickname (“alias”) to quickly identify your different accounts. You can also leave the fields blank to see the default email addresses on each service, which includes Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, in addition to Yahoo, but it may have support for other webmail services.

You can check for additional services if you click on the Scripts button.

Additional services supported on Chrome (which you can check on this page) are Zoho Mail, Twitter, Facebook, and many more.

What I really like about the extension isn’t only the multiple account support, but the fact that when you click on the extension icon, you can choose which webmail interface to open up in a separate tab since the extension supports auto-login.

You can also click on Open All to have all the different services load up in separate tabs.

You can also set the interval on which the extension should check for new email in your accounts. The default is 10 minutes, but you can definitely change it with ease.

Enable Desktop Notifications

If you’re the type of person that doesn’t mind getting notification bubbles in your Windows desktop, you’ll surely like X-Notifier’s desktop notifications, which you can even set to keep open and close manually if you don’t want to miss anything (by unchecking “Auto hide notification“), but you can also choose to automatically hide the notifications. You can also turn on sound notifications, and even set a custom sound by inputting the audio URL.

Since I’ve had this extension for a while (pretty much since I switched to Chrome), I have come to not want desktop notifications for email, as they can be distracting especially when I’m trying to get something done, and I already check my Gmail pretty frequently. Thus, I prefer to get information on demand. It may be the opposite for you though. Still, having the extension is time-saving as it’s basically a mini information center detailing how many messages I’m missing, and if I do have any unread ones, it can take me straight to the corresponding website.

In Ubuntu, this extension is really supplemental as the built-in Evolution and Gwibber can do the job. In Windows 7, you can have Windows Live Mail.

What do you use to help you automatically check your email?