A big thanks to Mark M on the CFeclipse for dishing out some Gmail invites, one of which i now have. So i've also be doing some searching for tool and found the following:
Gmail Notifier - A plugin for firefox to check your emails and goto the Gmail inbox.
Gmail Helper - A tool straight from Google to site in your tray to check your mail whether you're in a broswer or not. Though at the moment it always opens IE, im gonna go searching later to find out how to get it to open Firefox.
They question is, how long before i start recieving span on it?