Gmail, Google's popular Web mail application, is already full of useful features all on its own. But Firefox users can further customize Gmail with a variety of add-ons. Some only change the appearance, while others add functionality that makes Gmail more like a personal planner than just a plain old email application. Let's take a look at three Firefox add-ons for Gmail.

Always have a browser tab open to your Gmail account? heckGmail is an application that can monitor your Gmail account for you. It's unobtrusive, feature-rich, and easy to configure.

I have a bunch of single-use Gmail accounts for the usual things, like account registrations, site administration, newsletter subscriptions and the like. If you have this same situation, you know that (unless you possess unusual patience) it’s not easy to serially open up multiple Gmail accounts if you have saved the login information for an auto-login.

If you are into email like Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan were in the movie You've Got Mail, you probably want to be warned as soon as any message enters your mailbox. If you use Gmail, you can try one of several Gmail-specific applications that let you know when new messages arrive.

Gmail is undoubtedly the best web-based email around. Unfortunately Google doesn't have any Gmail notifier for Linux. However thanks to the open-source world there are many alternatives out to choose from and whats better is that all of them are better than their windows counterparts and are free. Here is a list to help you chose one.

I really like Gmail, but I also like having backups of my data just in case. Here’s how to use a simple program called getmail on Unix to backup your Gmail or Google Apps email. We’ll break this into four steps.

The best Linux gmail checker is named CheckGmail. Now why am I raving about a gmail mail checker? You ask, how different can it be from the other gmail checkers, because don't they all do the same thing, notify you when you get mail?

"Like many folks, I use Google for more and more. When I noticed Google's announcement that Gmail supports IMAP, I knew I could read my Gmail from Emacs..."

After seriously giving Firefox 3 Beta 4 a try due to Safari 3.1 breaking the Shift key in Gmail (update: as kindly pointed out by some of my readers in the comments, it was Gmail that was broken, not Safari 3.1, doh), I’ve converted to using Firefox 3 Beta 4 as my primary browser.