Is there any way to coax Gmail into pushing new-mail notifications into my Linux machine, without using a full-on graphical mail client like Thunderbird?
edit: Thanks for all the responses, but (unless I'm mistaken) these applications all poll, none of them receive notifications pushed from GMail.
Also, I'd prefer a console-based program, as this will be running on a headless server.
There is a program called checkgmail
(http://checkgmail.sourceforge.net/)
that will sit in your gnome taskbar. I know there is a plasma widget for KDE
(http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/gmail-plasmoid?content=101229)
that does something similar, although from what I've read, it might be a little broken.
The program Docky2 has a pretty good gmail notifier built in if you use a compositing window manager like compiz or metacity.
I don't know of any terminal based checkers if you don't have an X11 at all.
Mail Notification supports Gmail. It can check multiple accounts simultaneously so you can also use it to notify you of new mail in Evolution, Thunderbird or IMAP and POP accounts.
I know this question is quite old but it came up in my search and I thought I'd update. Evolution now supports IMAP+ or IMAPx which enables IMAP IDLE, and so gmail can push mail to it.
http://chenthill.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/evolution-with-improved-imap-support-imapx/
Gmail doesn't push. You can receive an atom feed:
http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/faq.html#GmailAtomFeed
