If you want to be notified whenever you have a new email or Chat message, we suggest enabling desktop notifications for Gmail. When enabled, a pop-up window will appear on your desktop, so even if you’re not looking at Gmail you can always know if someone is trying to contact you.

Desktop notifications are one of many convenient ways to keep up to date with Gmail notifications. These should now be functional on all major browsers, but we suggest sticking to Chrome as it first introduced the feature and is a part of Google’s ecosystem.

A few other things to keep in mind:

1.) Chat notifications are enabled by default, but you can always disable them if you want
2.) After enabling notifications, make sure to approve mail.google.com to show desktop notifications
3.) To make sure you receive desktop notifications, you’ll need to be logged into Gmail in one of your windows

To enable desktop notifications:

1.) Click the gear icon in the upper right, then select Settings.

2.) On the General tab, select the option you’d like in the Desktop Notifications section.

3.) Choose to turn email notifications off, receive notifications for all incoming email, or only those Gmail marks ‘important’.

4.) Save your changes.

Click here to watch this video on YouTube.

Updated for 2021