Offline Gmail

Reading your emails offline from the browsers itself seems to be a better option tha using the email clients mainly due to the fact that one gets to use the same email interface when done from the browser as against the complex interfaces some of the email clients offer.

Google is extending this offline feature in its Gmail with the help of Google gears. Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Gears is currently a beta product; moreover, it is currently considered to be a developer-only release. Gears extends browsers by making new APIs available to JavaScript code.

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.

To use this feature, one has to install google gears first. It can be obtained from http://gears.google.com The setup file is a 500Kb file, which gets downloaded in a flash. The installer connects to the internet and downloads the gears application from the google servers after which one has to restart the browsers.

After logging into Gmail, navigate to the settings tab and select the labs option.



Select enable under the Offline section and click save changes button. This section displays all the applications from the google labs' vault which the user has enabled.





After your browser reloads, you'll see a new "Offline0.1" link in the upper righthand corner of your account, next to your username
.


When the link is clicked, gears starts synchronizing the mails and starts to store them in the local hard drive. The status message shows how many have been synchronized and the date till which mails have been backed up.



Once done, one can use it the same way the online version functions.

Everything said and done, this is still an experimental feature and users may send the glitches they come across, to google.