Unread in Bookmarks for Gmail by kvachikk

A mail checker that uses the space you already have. Instead of another icon to
squint at, this extension puts the unread count directly on your bookmarks
toolbar and keeps it current.

WHAT IT DOES

On first run it creates one bookmark on your bookmarks toolbar and renames that
bookmark on a timer. Your own bookmarks are never read, moved or modified — the
extension remembers the ids of the ones it made and touches nothing else.
Clicking one opens that mailbox; clicking the toolbar icon forces an immediate
refresh.

When a mailbox has nothing unread it says "nothing" rather than "0", which you
can change.

SEVERAL MAILBOXES

Add as many mailboxes as you need, up to ten, and each gets its own bookmark.
A work account and a personal one can sit side by side on the toolbar. For each
you choose:

• the account — its position in Google's own account switcher, the /u/0/ part
of a Gmail URL
• the label — empty for the inbox, or a label name to count that instead
• what the title says, with {n} standing in for the count, and separate text
for when it is empty. Prefixes like "work {n}" are what make two bookmarks
readable at a glance.

Removing a mailbox removes its bookmark with it. The toolbar icon's badge shows
the total across all of them, and its tooltip breaks that down per mailbox.

PRIVACY

Nothing is collected and nothing is transmitted anywhere except Gmail itself.
There is no server, no account, no OAuth, no API key, no analytics and no
telemetry. Your settings and the bookmark ids are stored on your device with
storage.local, and deliberately not with storage.sync, so they never travel
through a Mozilla account.

The feed the extension reads does contain message subjects and senders. The
extension reads none of them: it matches one regular expression for the unread
number and discards the rest of the response unparsed.

The extension holds a host permission for mail.google.com and nothing else, so
it is not technically able to contact another host. There is no content script,
so it runs on no web page at all.

HOW IT WORKS

It reads Gmail's own atom feed — the one desktop mail checkers have used for
twenty years — authenticated by the Google cookies already in your browser.
Nothing is asked of you: if you are signed in to Gmail in this Firefox profile,
it works.

SOURCE

https://github.com/kvachikk/unread-in-bookmarks-for-gmail

There is no build step. The code in the add-on is the code in the repository,
unminified and readable. A privacy check runs in CI on every commit and fails
the build if any network call, dynamic-code call, synced storage, sensor API,
analytics name, or URL outside mail.google.com appears in the source.

Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Google. "Gmail" is a
trademark of Google LLC, used here only to say what this extension works with.