This works very nicely. This is probably the most refined and well designed Chrome extension I've ever seen. Great job! You may want to gray/hide 'Clear all' when nothing new is showing up.
Does it also do reddit's http://www.reddit.com/message/moderator/ mail? Will it ping Gmail a lot? I stopping using any Gmail extensions because Google treats frequent queries as bots and blocks the originating IP for hours.
Also, nice name :) For well over a decade, I've been doing things under the name 'chime' so it's a bit weird when I see someone else create apps with that name.
Another thing you may want to do is stop pinging Gmail if it returns a couple of failures. I noticed that when Gmail signed off automatically for any reason, any additional pings caused the account to be locked. This is purely anecdotal so dig into it yourself if you have some time. Last thing you want to do is cause Gmail to block your users' mailboxes.
Thanks for the heads up! Gmail was the first service we implemented and have been testing thoroughly so we had some time to settle on an optimal ping frequency. As for now, we're confident this will not block your Gmail.
If you are completely client side, how are you tracking the total number of notifications served? I would assume you would have to send some data back to the server to keep track?
We're completely client side, so there are no privacy concerns.