Thu 29 Jan 2009
Google is now offering offline browser-based access to Gmail as an experimental feature in Google Labs. With this service even if you are offline you will be able to go to gmail.com and get access to your mail.
So why would you want access to your Gmail offline?
If you are a person who travels a lot and often find yourself offline then you will now be able to access your Gmail emails and write new emails using the Gmail interface no matter where you are. Any messages you send while you are offline will wait in your outbox until you are next connected to the net and then send automatically. Any changes you make while offline e.g. deleting email will be automatically synchronised with your online Gmail account once you reconnect.
This service will not replicate your entire Gmail inbox on your PC as this in many cases would be too much data. Instead Gmail will use algorithms to determine which messages to download to your PC depending on how recent they are if they are likely to be important to you based on how you labelled them etc.
To read more about this from Computer World click here. To read more about this and see a video of how it works from the Gmail blog click here.