hertenberger.co.za

I was eagerly watching the lab tab in my GMail settings, hoping to see the new offline feature appear. This morning, I saw that the new feature had been added and I immediately activated it.

Offline GMail utilizes Google Gears, a small framework that needs to be installed to the local machine. WordPress and Google Docs are two online applications that make good use of providing synchronization features for both online and offline content. Google Gears works remarkably well in my experience. So far, I’ve been very impressed with the offline support it provides for GMail, too.

Once the offline GMail feature has been enabled in your settings a new link becomes available at the top of the screen.

To start using offline mail, click the link. This starts the installation of the local framework component necessary to synchronize mail messages. It also installs an icon to your desktop if that is required.

Once that’s been done, the synchronization process gets underway. In my case, I left it running. And, it’s still running There are many, many messages to download during the first run. The process can be stopped and started as required.

The Google team understands South African Internet access difficulties: Flaky Connection Mode must have been added just for us…

Offline access to the synchronized mail content is very speedy and the online experience is preserved. It’s a great feature to have and obviates the need to pull down mail messages into a dedicated mail client on different machines just in case one needs to refer to a specific mail message. The offline GMail feature has made the already indispensable GMail even more appealing!