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Are you one of the folks who has an Google email account? They are not hard to find, and very easy to get and many folks find it very handy. But for most Windows users, trying to adopt a webmail-like email such as GMAIL in place of typical clients like Outlook Express can have some problems.

Enter Google Notify. Its a great little tool that simply monitors calls to email and redirects them to your Gmail account. No more clicking on email links on web pages and getting outlook express popping up. Now the request generates a gmail compose message and seems to work very well. It will also tell you when you have new mail!

What if it doesn’t work?

First lets see where we get info and can download Gnotify, or Google Notifier at:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=9429

Now lets say you’ve decided to use SSL to use your Google Mail account such as the blogs like this one are quite basic in explaining how easy it is:

http://journal.andrewloe.com/2007/4/14/google-notifier-using-ssl

But if you didn’t pay attention to all the notes about the ‘patch’ or have an older download you have probably encountered this message when you start Google Notifier:

Error connecting to Server

So you ‘check mail’ and the browser loads up and connects fine. So you’re probably scraching (or worse) your head wondering what the problem is. Well it’s that you enabled SSL for your Gmail, and the Google Notifier is not configured to work with SSL connections. Hence you keep getting the error.

The above link now explains this problem, and advises you to download a newer version or download the patch. Or you can simple add a key to your windows registry yourself that fixes this.

Now, WARNING!! Careless use of registry editors can cause a complete failure of your computer. You understand the risks and follow these instructions knowing that you are fully responsible for the results. I will not be to blame for you using these instructions if something goes wrong. I highly recommend that you backup your registry and/or any modified keys prior to making any changes. If you cannot follow these instructions due to understanding a particular step then you should refer to someone who is familiar with editing the registry before going forward.

Ok, so now that’s out of the way, heres the instructions.

1. Start REGEDT32 by clicking on Start -> Run, then type regedt32
2. Now, navigate to the following location: HKCU/Software/Google/Gmail/Flags
3. Here we need to add a new item in the Flags key, so right click on the right panel and select New – String Value
4. This should create a new value and you should type url and hit enter.
5. Right click on url and select modify
6. In the VALUE DATA section enter https://mail.google.com/mail, then click ok.

Now we start the Notifier program or restart it if it was currently running, no need to reboot the PC! And now you should be getting proper notification of your new email on your Google Mail account.

I wrote this back in December, 2008 and decided I’d still post it even though Google FINALLY got smart and fixed this. It’s too bad they weren’t listening sooner as some reported this nearly a YEAR ago, but thanks Google for providing the fix.

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2 Responses to “Google notify not working?”

1. Anonymous says:

   February 14, 2009 at 02:37

   Thanks a lot.
2. roseki says:

   July 7, 2009 at 03:42

   Looks very interesting. Thanks for sharing..