How To Access & Use Gmail Offline

Have you ever wanted to check your mail and found the connection failing you? Now you can say goodbye to this sort of frustration with a Google initiative that started almost a year ago. Offline Gmail was, until very recently, an experimental feature in Gmail Labs, but now you can find it under your Gmail settings. Talent finds out how Offline Gmail is all set to write off your connection woes.




To be able to access Gmail account offline, you’ll need to first download and install Google Gears. If you’re using Google’s Chrome browser, though, you can relax since Chrome comes with Gears installed by default.

Once Gears installed, just go to Settings->Labs and enable the Offline feature.

Gmail should now reload and you will see a new link titled “Offline” right next to the “Settings” link in the top right corner of the Gmail window.
Click on Offline and Google Gears will throw a warning at you that some website named http://mail.google.com is trying to access Gears. Since I was quite sure that it’d harmless, I let the website access Gears and you should probably do the same.

At this point, Gmail will begin downloading what it thinks are the most important emails to you. I’m saying “what it thinks” because the Gmail team has a pretty nifty algorithm to determine the emails that it downloads. For me that figure came to “about 3 years” worth of my emails and you might get a different figure, depending on the amount of email that you get.

At any rate, Gears will download about 10000 of your latest emails, not counting the Trash and Spam folder so this should be enough for most of us.

Gears will also offer to create a shortcut for Gmail on the desktop. With this shortcut, you can login Gmail in offline mode right from your desktop.

If you send any emails in this mode and you’re offline, Gmail will keep them in the outbox and send them as soon as you come back online, and you’ll never even come to know about your connection status. In my opinion, you should always keep this option checked. To enable the flaky connection mode, click on the Offline Gmail icon next to the Settings link.