sonnet media LLC

Finally, the online and offline worlds take a big leap toward convergence with Google’s gmail going offline. It works through a program called Google Gears that stores your data on your browser. I’ve been using Google Gears for offline access my “Remember The Milk” online to-do list app`for a while now and it works seamlessly. I also use a lot of Gmail “Labs” features – beta releases of features that may be included in the standard version at some point – and have had nary a problem.

According to Google’s Gmail blog,

“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. You can read messages, star and label them, and do all of the things you’re used to doing while reading your webmail online. Any messages you send while offline will be placed in your outbox and automatically sent the next time Gmail detects a connection. 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.”

This is good news since I know some people who download their Gmail to other programs for offline access or don’t use Gmail at all because of that. So far, Google Apps email doesn’t have the feature – they tend to roll things out more slowly there – but if you’re like me, you have your Google Apps email forwarded into your Gmail account so you can get everything through one access point.

One other thing to note. When I went to start my offline setup it indicated that because of my volume of email (about 1gb) the program would only keep 3 months of emails, except for several folders, which it seemed to identify as useful on its own. It’s always amazing what you can do when you through billions of bucks at a problem!

Here’s the video version of above…