Offline Gmail is Almost Like the Real Thing

When Google Tuesday launched a system for accessing Gmail without a Net connection, they promised it would act almost exactly like regular Gmail. From my early testing, it seems like that claim isn't entirely true -- in some ways, offline Gmail actually works better than the online version.

The main difference is speed. Regular Gmail is generally fairly quick, but you can still find yourself waiting at times for it to check in with Google's servers. In offline mode or the very cool Flaky Connection Mode, everything -- opening messages, searching for information, labeling missives -- happens almost instantly, since all the data is local.

The tradeoff is that you don't have access to all of your mail. For my account, the system synced up around 6500 messages, about two months worth of email. (It's not clear whether Gmail limits the cache by the number of messages or the length of time since they were sent. I've got a question in to Google to find out.)

One mystery: Google's offline settings reports that it will sync all my messages that have one of four labels. One of those labels is Starred, which makes sense. The other three categories seem to have been chosen at random. And I couldn't find any way to change which labels get the full backup treatment.

You turn on offline capability through Gmail Labs. If you haven't already, you'll need to install Google Gears, the background system that enables offline capability in services like Google Documents and Zoho Mail. Once you okay Gmail using Gears, it'll start downloading messages. On the EV-DO connection I use during my commute (the very definition of a flaky connection), Gmail synched about 150 messages a minute. Once I got on my home broadband connection, things went much faster.

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