Productivity Sauce

Despite its power and convenience, Gmail has one serious limitation: the desktop integration. The Gnome Gmail tool solves this problem for users running the Gnome desktop environment.

This little helper is available as .deb and .rpm packages, so installing it on your system is a matter of a few clicks. Once Gnome Gmail is installed, you have to adjust your system's settings, which is also an easy thing to do. On Ubuntu, go to System -> Preferences -> Preferred Applications, and select Gmail from the Mail Reader drop-down list. That's all there is to it. But what exactly does Gnome Gmail do? For starters, it uses Gmail for all mailto links on Web pages. Better yet, it supports the To, Subject, CC, and BCC fields. There is also a handy bookmarklet available on the project's Web site. Add the bookmarklet to your browser, and you can quickly email the link to the currently viewed Web page via Gmail. In addition to that, Gnome Gmail integrates into Nautilus, which means that you can send any file as an attachment directly from within the file browser via the Send To command.