Wizard's Blog

One of the most eagerly anticipated features for GMail is offline access, and today Google finally announced that it was available! (as a Labs feature)

Once this is finalized as a release quality feature for everyone to use, Google will have really closed the gap with Outlook.  Combined with Google Apps functionality for enterprises, Google Calendar and Google Docs, I can’t think of a compelling reason to keep buying new versions of Office every couple of years.

As expected, the GMail offline access feature uses Gears – same as the offline access in Google Docs etc.

As well as straight offline mode, it also has ”flaky connection mode”, which acts like offline mode in that you’re always dealing with a locally cached version of your mail, but also synchs continually in the background like online mode.  I imagine this will speed some mail functions in the same way that Outlook’s Cached Exchange Mode does because more of the processing happens locally.

Apparently they’re slowly rolling the offline feature out, so I haven’t been able to test it yet but I’m really looking forward to it.

Once the option shows up in your Labs, you enable offline access by following these steps:

1. Click Settings and click the Labs tab.
2. Select Enable next to Offline Gmail.
3. Click Save Changes.
4. After your browser reloads, you’ll see a new “Offline^0.1” link in the upper righthand corner of your account, next to your username. Click this link to start the offline set up process and download Gears if you don’t already have it.

EDIT: There appear to be some known issues – you can’t send an offline message with attachments and you can’t access the contact manager offline.  Forgivable in a beta, but these things will need to be fixed.

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