Gmail Offline Is Here

Bevan Rudge

on

January 30, 2009

Gmail Offline Is Here

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Gmail offline is finally here! As per my message on twitter; It's fast – even better than Gmail online. Faster than desktop apps. The internet revolution is here! You'll need to enable Gmail "Experimental features" first. I've forgotten how to do this, but I think it's in the admin "cpanel" for Google Apps for Your Domain. I'm not sure about Google-proper Gmail. Once you have that;
  1. go to Settings (in Gmail)
  2. then Labs
  3. enable Offline (probably the first one)
  4. save settings
You'll also need to install Google Gears, which is available for most modern versions of most mainstream browsers – but not webkit yet (Safari & Fluid.app). That's coming, but it's not ready yet. UPDATE: To use google gears with fluid.app, install google gears in Safari, and make sure your fluid.app apps are up to date. Note it saves all your emails and attachments to your local machine, which can take a lot of time, bandwidth and hard drive space when you first enable it or start using it on a different machine. John Resig (jQuery creator) reported it only saved some messages. I couldn't find any settings to change this behaviour though, so I'm not sure why that is.

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christylea February 5, 2009
This is the first I had heard about Gmail Offline, but it sounds interesting. There are a couple things I do not like, such as the fact that it decides which messages to store locally and also that you can not use any attachments on your messages. You also can't access the contact manager. These are some pretty serious limitations, although I am sure that this will improve with age, after all it is from Google and is only in its beginning stages. I would like to see what the future holds for this, and should be interesting to see how hotmail responds, I am sure they have something in the works, you now how they let the competition get to them. ----------- Christy http://realestatelicensedirect.com
Owen Barton January 31, 2009
Installing Google Gears needs some hackery - add "user_pref("extensions.checkCompatibility", false);" to the prefs.js for your Gmail prism app (in ~/.prism/gmail/mho43sqb.default for me). Then you need to download the xpi and drag and drop it on to the prism app. According to Wired at http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/01/no-wifi-no-prob.html it doesn't download all mail - just the 10000 (or so) messages it determines as most likely to be read.