Get your GMail offline

Wed 28 January 2009 08:37, Bas van den Beld

One of the most popular services that Google has launched is without a doubt Gmail. The mailclient is being used by more and more users worldwide. Partly because of the need to have a Gmail-account to access other services (like Analytics) but mainly because of the easy usage.

With GMail you have a big storage space for all your e-mail. Attachments are not a problem and the service is almost never down. There's only one 'but' to that. Gmail is always online. And though most searchmarketeers are online a lot, nobody is always online. Google now released an experimental feature in Gmail which should fix this: offline Gmail.

The feature is still in a test-phase and part of Gmail Labs. The way it works is a lot similar to the way Google Reader works when going to the offline mode. It uses Google Gears to download the local cache of your e-mail.

A big difference with the offline Reader is that the cache is constantly updated when you have connection. If the connection is gone, you're e-mail isn't, because GMail automatically switches to the offline mode. In the offline mode you can do everything the way you do when you're online. Only new e-mail won't be received and your e-mail is will not be sent until you connect again.

Google is making the offline Gmail available for those in the US but also for those who use the UK English version. Google warns we must not "be surprised if you run into some kinks that haven't been completely ironed out yet".

To get started simply follow these steps:

Click Settings and click the Labs tab.
Select Enable next to Offline Gmail.
Click Save Changes.
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.

Google also released this video:

<Londoners want Google’s Print Ads

Google still number one in UK>

Comments (1)

- Erdal
- [website]
It's a nice feature especially for those people who are travelling a lot. You can catch up your mails using offline Gmail. Looking forward to test it :-)

Wo 28 jan 2009, 09:42

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