Offline Gmail using Google Gears

Posted on February 3, 2009 at 5:27 am

Last December 2007 we have wrote about websites that work offline thanks to Google Gears. Now we will explore a very significant development from Google Gears for GMail. You read it right, now you can use GMail offline like how you use MS Outlook for offline use.

So what steps do we need to do to be able to make this work? Below are some of the steps I went through for my Gmail account:

Step 1: Make sure you have a GMail account, apply online if you don’t have one yet as the next steps will only work with your GMail account.

Step 2: Download the latest gears installer from http://gears.google.com/

Step 3: Restart your web browser to activate the Gears program

You should see Gears as one of the Add-ons in your web browser. It looks like this in Firefox 3:

Step 4: Go to your Gmail account and enable the offline setting under labs tab:

You’re done! To test it, turn off your network connection and notice how you can still browse your Gmail account’s inbox, sent items, drafts, etc… you can even “send” emails – but of course it will only send and receive messages once you get back online.

Google Gears is truly a great offline gadget. You can use it to achieve better offline productivity since you don’t have to be online just to process Gmail emails.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done!

» Filed Under Google Software/Tips

Comments

2 Responses to “Offline Gmail using Google Gears”

pitchin’ from the nosebleed section » Blog Archive » Offline GMail? Says:

[...] was cruising the net today and came across this article. Very simple instructions on how to set up your system to allow access to your GMail account [...]
February 3rd, 2009 at 7:35 am
Top 9 cool and useful Gmail lab features Says:

[...] – Using Google Gears, you can access Gmail while you are offline. Click on the previous link to read my post on how to enable offline access to your Gmail account. [...]
June 27th, 2009 at 5:38 am