Yay, lovely lovely research! & lovely lovely words!! I don't think you have to worry about not including the prompt just yet, especially since as you said, they're sort of background.

Heh, I keep my Gmail open in a tab, but that means I spend a lot of time clicking over to see if anything new has come in. ^^;; I have the Gmail notifier (where you have a little icon in your toolbar w/the number of unread messages you have), but it doesn't update that often (I need to go look at preferences to change that), so I end up looking at my Gmail tab anyway.