Michael Magrath’s Blog

On January 27, 2009 gmail released a offline version of their web based email. It is now possible to check your current emails if you have no internet access available. Last time I checked I think it downloads the latest 10,000 messages. So for an example you type up an email on gmail and click send since you are using the offline version of gmail it will stay in your outbox and when you connect back to the internet later it will send the emails and check for new messages. 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.

This is still a experimental feature so it may have a couple of bugs.

To set it up

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.

Here is a interesting video that the gmail team made that covers all the features of the new gmail offline labs feature.