Check your email even before you open your inbox

Know what would be a nifty timesaver? Some way for us to check our inboxes before we open it. No, I’m not crazy or anything (even though I may sound kind of like it). It’ll be great for those who have a really bad internet connection, really. And come on, who hasn’t impatiently sat through one of those Gmail “Loading…” screens during the aforementioned internet slowdowns, wishing that the inbox would hurry the heck up and load right away.

Now, even though it sounds kind of ridiculous, I kinda love the idea. This way we’d be able to know which emails to delete and which ones are pure gold. Okay, not pure gold. I mean which emails are really important.

Now you can check you inbox even before you open your inbox in a variety of ways. First off is via the use of a Firefox add-on.

The Gmail Manager add-on is something I’ve been using for years already. And I’ve always been satisfied with it. So the concept is pretty simple: just go to the add-ons site, install it by clicking on the nice big green button, restart everybody’s favorite browser when we get to the prompt, and we’d see the Gmail logo on the lower right side, in gray. Right click on it, select “Preferences,” put in your Gmail login details (heck, it’ll even accept your Google Apps account as well) and you’re done! For your protection though, there’s an option that always lets you use a secured connection (https://) when it pulls up the latest content of your inbox. Make sure it’s checked.

Now to use Gmail Manager, just hover your mouse over the Gmail icon for a few seconds, and you’ll get a summary of your inbox’s latest state at once.

Now if you’re using another browser, or if you don’t feel like using a Firefox add-on, there’s Gmail Labs to save the day. Peter Balsiger, Google Software Engineer, has created a new Labs feature called Inbox Preview. So while your inbox is loading, a simple, static preview of your inbox with your ten most recent messages is displayed.

To activate this newfangled Labs feature, just click here, and scroll down to Inbox Preview and enable it. It’ll work even if you have a Google Apps account.

Do you know of other ways to preview your inbox even before you get to it?