Just a quick tip - if you want to create a shortcut for checking your Google Mail, but don't want to have to search through all labels for new mail, you can search for is:unread in the search field. That shows all the unread messages across all labels in one place.

Even better than that, you can create a shortcut to do that search automatically. Where I used to have http://mail.google.com in my bookmarks, I now have http://mail.google.com/mail/#search/is:unread, which takes me to the list of mails that I need to read.