At last, something a lot of Gmail users have been asking for has been delivered: Offline Gmail. It’ll be released over the next few days as a Gmail Labs offering and will be powered by Google Gears. Once you have it, you’ll be able to work on your email – still in your browser – regardless of your current network connection.
(I have over 5 GB in my corporate Gmail account. That’s sure going to be a long initial sync, isn’t it? Blimey…)
Once you’re synced up you can have no connection, intermittent connection or full time connection and continue to work seamlessly. For folks who travel a lot I’d think this is pretty exciting stuff. For those of us striving for “always on” connectivity it is really more of a safety net than anything else.
Once you turn on this feature, Gmail uses Gears to download a local cache of your mail. As long as you’re connected to the network, that cache is synchronized with Gmail’s servers. When you lose your connection, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode, and uses the data stored on your computer’s hard drive instead of the information sent across the network.
[…]
And if you’re on an unreliable or slow connection (like when you’re “borrowing” your neighbor’s wireless), you can choose to use “flaky connection mode,” which is somewhere in between: it uses the local cache as if you were disconnected, but still synchronizes your mail with the server in the background.
I think this is pretty cool from a geek standpoint but I can’t say it’ll really change much for me.
Cnet’s article points out a few things to be aware of, however. We won’t be adding attachments to mail when offline, nor will we be able to add contacts or manage local email lists. Other than that though it sounds pretty full featured.
I’m mildly amused that Zoho Mail, also using Gears, delivered this last October. However, I don’t use Zoho Mail…
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January 27th, 2009 
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Wow this is sweet for those times the Internet goes out at the dorms, around campus, or coffee shops. Although, since I have an Android phone I technically have some sort of offline Gmail.
Chris, I wonder how long it will take to download it all, “every last gigabyte.” Definitely time it and tell us!
I just got it enabled for my corporate (Enterprise) Google Apps acount.
After enabling the labs feature you have to go back into settings to actually turn it on and enable it — the default appears to be the most recent year’s worth of email. Can also manage some exceptions by label.
Pretty cool stuff
Hmm, not sure how to manage what labels it decided to use when going back furtherr in time.
I’m sure you saw this http://lifehacker.com/5140828/how-offline-gmail-decides-which-messages-to-download on Lifehacker. It explains how Gmail Offline decides to “sync” your email and labels.
Sign-out and refresh… Oh, I have it now. Snazy.
hey Kaleb, i hadn’t seen that article (I can’t even try to keep up with that site anymore!) but it helps explain things. A bit.
It would be nice if we could tweak some of that though…
Excellent stuff ! I think it will be much better for the users of gmail to use if as Offline gmail.
even though there were some third party tools available to accomplish the same thing, its great that Google itself has released the tool!
Having offline email is going to be a great option; as a business man, I’ve been in some situations when having received an important email and having to discuss it on the phone while not having an internet connection screwed things up a bit, but now this concern is gone.