I bet that mail client of yours just lies there doing nothing, when its sole purpose is to inform you the minute you get a new e-mail. Well, that client just takes up more memory, to just do that, doesn’t it? What if you could just check new mail via an RSS feed?
liferea to the rescue! It’s a simple, easy, and powerful RSS client, which can manage many feeds and provides notification via libnotify. Setting up gmail as a new feed is very easy. Follow your distribution specific install guide here.
Launch liferea from the menu, and click on “New Subscription”. The Feed Source for gmail’s RSS feed to your inbox is https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom. Click on OK, then a little while later, it will ask for your login credentials.
Username: example Password: ******
Do not include @gmail.com. And your all set to receive mail updates. Look in the Tools -> Preferences to tune liferea.
You can also add your facebook notifications feed as well.