It’s experimental, and not quite perfect yet, but everybody loves it all the same. No, I’m not talking about the Obama Administration. It’s offline Gmail, which is now available via Google Gears. Here’s the scoop, straight from the Official 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.
While offline, you can read, label, and “star” messages — pretty much everything you can do while online. When you compose and send a message, it gets queued in your outbox to be sent the next time there’s a connection.
Shwing! This is beyond awesome for the Gmail set. The next time you board a plane or try to work someplace without an Internet connection, you can still read, reply to, and create mail.
Watch the above video to learn more about offline Gmail. Then follow these steps to get started with it:
- 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 “Offline0.1” 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.
All I can say is, about time, Google!
