Gmail Desktop
Nifty Gmail desktop app
Highlights
- Appearance customizations
- Custom styles
- Desktop notifications
- macOS: Unread badge in dock
- Windows/Linux: Unread icon tray
- Silent auto-updates
- Clean email links from Google
- Confirm email links before opening to prevent phishing
- Cross-platform
Installation
macOS 10.13+, Linux and Windows 8+ are supported (64-bit only).
macOS
Download the latest .dmg file.
Linux
Download the latest .AppImage or .deb file.
Windows
Download the latest .exe file.
Features
Appearance customizations
Gmail Desktop provides a number of appearance customizations to improve and simplify the default Gmail styles. These customizations are enabled by default and configurable under the Settings → Appearance menu.
Compact Header: Customizes the Gmail header to use a more compact style to provide a more native feel. This setting requires a restart to be applied.Hide Footer: Hides footer information text (storage used, terms links, etc.).Hide Right Sidebar: Hides the Google apps sidebar on the right side of the interface.Hide Support: Hides the support button in the header.
Custom styles
In addition to the available appearance customizations, custom user styles can be applied. Click the menu item Settings → Appearance → Custom Styles to open the custom CSS file in the default editor for CSS files.
Confirm email links before opening to prevent phishing
Confirm email links can be disabled at Settings → Confirm External Links before Opening.
Clean email links from Google
Email links in Gmail are usually prepended with https://google.com/url?q=<actual_url>, which is not visible to the user. While we don't know exactly why or what it does, it's unnecesary and we believe it does some tracking stuff. Gmail Desktop automatically cleans links from this, so the actual URL will be directly opened in the browser.
Troubleshooting
I can't sign in: This browser or app may not be secure
In December 2019 Google has decided to block unsupported user agents, such as Electron, from signing in to Google accounts for security reasons (related issue: #174).
We doubt this will ever change, so we are required to override the Electron default user agent with a supported user agent in order to sign in successfully.
Gmail Desktop offers to try to automatically fix the user agent when the issue above occurs:
Clicking on Yes will restart Gmail Desktop and fetches a suitable user agent based on the OS from https://www.whatismybrowser.com/guides/the-latest-user-agent/firefox that will be set in the app config. In our experience Firefox works well and consistent across all OS.
In case the user agent fix isn't working anymore, you can trigger an automatic user agent fix again in the menu Settings → Advanced → User Agent → Try To Fix Automatically
If the automatic user agent fix isn't working at all or you want to set your own user agent, you are able to override the user agent via the menu Settings → Advanced → Edit Config File, which opens the JSON config file in your editor.
In the config file, add a new key overrideUserAgent and set an user agent as string (e.g. from https://www.whatismybrowser.com/guides/the-latest-user-agent).
Example (do not copy user agent):
{
"overrideUserAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36"
}Save the file, restart Gmail Desktop and sign in again.
Developing
Built with Electron.
Install
yarn installRun
yarn startBuild
yarn distMaintainers
Contributors
Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):
 Ramin Banihashemi 💻 🤔 |
 Callum Loh 💻 |
 herrevilkitten 💻 |
 Zilin Zhu 💻 |
 Ciprian Dorin Craciun 🤔 |
 Cyrus Frost 💻 🚧 |
 Zhipeng Zhang 💻 |
 Jérôme Lemaire 💻 |
This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!
Disclaimer
Gmail Desktop is a third-party app and not affiliated with Google.