Last tuesday the Gmail Labs engineers add another excellent feature to Gmail called Offline Gmail. This feature as you guess will let all Gmail users to access their inboxes when they are offline, simply by open their web browser and go to gmail.com to get their mail just as usual. Also, you can use all Gmail's features when you are offline.

To use this feature, first you must enable it in the Labs Tab under your Gmail Settings and save your changes, after that click on the Offline link located at the upper right area of your account just next to your username, easy and simple.

To work, Offline Gmail uses Gears to download a local cache of your mail and store it on your pc, as long as you are connected this cache is synchronized with Gmail's servers, if you go offline, then Gmail automaticaly switches to offline mode, and uses this local cache stored on your machine instead of the data sent across the network, and allowing you for example to read your messages or to label some of them as usual.

BTW, take in mind that this feature like all the features offered by the Gmail Labs Team are experimental and may change or disappear at any time, so use it at your own risk. Aditionally, consider how much space you are using before you go offline.

You can read the complete story at New in Labs: Offline Gmail under The Offical Gmail Blog.

Best regards,

Seems "US and UK" only.

Seems like what was often said, but never used for dialup. The whole go on for a minute, grab all we want, work on it for an hour then connect again. Pointless idea, though just less hassle for finishing an email while internet is down, rare. Even wireless wouldn't mean you'd save the email to your hard drive.

People who want their email available offline simply use POP3 to download the messages (even tough gmail's POP3 sucks because of the limited messages that can be downloaden )

I enabled POP3 for my Gmail account and just let Opera deal with the downloading and checking. I haven't really had a problem, though, in viewing the entirety of all of my e-mails; however, inline images don't show up, probably due to the image filtering that Gmail applies onto the e-mails.

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There aren't really that many useful modules for Gmail. I only really sign into Gmail, though, to empty out the spam, delete or archive e-mails and perhaps compose.

In the standard browser version of gmail, the images also don't show up, you have to click "let gmail show the images" in order to see them.

It's especialy the combination of Gmail and Pocket Outlook that give me problems. It can't get passed 400 and a bit messages, it just stops downloading new messages without letting you know there's a problem. Download a complete message also means that the message is removed from pocket outlook the next time I synch it ... The last thing is probably a PE error, but it just doesn't make things better

I did not know that GMail POP3 service has a limit of some kind, it's quite stupid to have a limit on a POP3 service to receive your daily mail.. I wonder what it is?

I know that for security reasons gmail and most of mail and most of other SMTP servers puts a limit for you to let SEND the mail to others, it protects for massive SPAM sending from the servers, as I know the limit is daily.. but for POP3 ???

Just read a little bit and found another bad thing about GMail, that if the account is not used for over 9 months, your account is deleted, I understand that it's quite "useful" for somebody to get a name which is not usable, but imagine if the email was used quite widely and someone else can get it.. It's really a bad idea, as usually email is something like an unique thing with exceptions..

Wow, also there is a filesize limit for 20 MB, that sucks, I know it's for security reasons, but if I lets say want to send legal file which is mine and it's ~50 MB.. GMail is not as good as I thought it was.

To add something about the offline version of GMail, well I don't see to much of advantage for it, nothing really cool or useful about it, could be very good for mobile gmail version to browse it offline, thats the only thing I can think off..