The worst part of having multiple e-mail addresses is keeping on top of new messages without spending every waking moment checking each account in sequence. That’s why I love “Gee!”:http://www.lloydslounge.org/gee/, a functional little GMail notifier for Mac OS X.

Gee (I’m going to stop exclaiming it) checks GMail’s Atom feed for my messages and updates a small blue circle in the menubar with the count of new ones. Pretty standard, but Gee goes one louder: clicking on the circle drops down a list of the senders’ addresses (or subject, or a combination depending on preference) so that I can quickly tell the difference between spam and an important message without pulling up GMail itself. If that’s not enough, Gee also lets me reset the counter so I can _choose to ignore it_ until something newer comes in.

That combination of simple features provides the best attention-span booster I’ve had in weeks. Of course, I just blew any productivity gain by blogging about it, but I had to share the love.