Saturday, August 22, 2009

Gmail Notifier -- Wasn't working, here's the fix...

For some months now, I've been having errors with Google Gmail Notifier. Whenever my machine restarts, I'm asked to login for that little app, which I do. It promptly says "Can't connect..." or some such thing. I typically just exit the app and don't think about it until my next reboot. The wheels on the bus go round and round....

I finally decided to investigate after installing the latest round of Windows Updates (which, of course, nags me to death until I reboot!) Seems that the culprit lies in the Gmail setting of "always use https" to connect to Gmail. Apparently that setting prevents the native Gmail Notifier of being able to fetch the data.

After some brief searching, it appears there is a very simple registry hack (done by double clicking a .reg file in a zip file you can grab.)

Here's the Google post with the zip and the details:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=9429

- Will Belden
August 22, 2009