Mountain View, California — Lost connectivity to your broadband — cannot access Gmail? Well, now you can dispel your worries about remaining connected to access your Gmail account. Google on Tuesday rolled out a much awaited in beta, an offline capability for its Gmail platform empowering business and consumer, empowering users to access their accounts offline and eventually calendar items while disconnected from the network. The move was announced in a posting to the Google Enterprise blog.
The company said that its Gmail Labs is formulating and testing offline capabilities that allow users to create Gmail, or browse your Gmail inbox all while offline. Offline Gmail will also empower users to compose new e-mails and move them to the Outbox, where they will wait until the user is online again to be sent. New messages will be delivered when the user re-connects to the network.
The offline e-mail service is developed on the two-year-old Google Gears platform. Gears is the foundation for offline access to a number of Web applications from Google, like the Google Reader RSS manager and the Google Docs word processor, including applications from other providers like Zoho, which utilizes it for offline access to its e-mail and word processing browser-based programs.
Rajen Sheth, senior product manager for Google Apps, said that applying Gears to Gmail has been a very complex task, primarily because of the high volume of messages accounts can store. “Gmail was a tough hurdle,” he said.
Google dismissed the option of allowing users replicate their entire Gmail inboxes to their PCs, which in most cases would translate into gigabytes of data flowing to people’s hard drives. It instead created algorithms that will automatically determine which messages should be downloaded to PCs, taking into consideration a variety of factors that reflect their level of importance to the user, he said. At this point, end-users will not be able to tweak these settings manually.
“We had to make it such that we are managing a sizable amount of information offline and doing it well in a way that is seamless to the end-user,” he said.
For example, in Gmail, users can apply labels on messages, as well as tag them with stars to indicate their importance, and Google can use that information to determine which messages to download. Sheth estimates that in many cases Gmail will download several thousand messages, preferring those that are more recent as well. Depending on the amount of messages users have on their accounts, they may get downloads going back two months or two years, he said.
The messages will be cached on the system by using Google Gears and without any Internet connection, users will be able to enter Gmail.com, check their inbox, read their messages and even write replies, which will be sent from the outbox as soon as the system reconnects.
For now, the service is available only in beta version, which is accessible through Gmail Labs. The new feature initially will be accessible only for U.S. and U.K. English versions of the client.
“As long as you are connected to the network, that cache is synchronized with Gmail’s servers. When you lose your connection, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode, and uses the data stored on your computer’s hard drive instead of the information sent across the network,” said Gmail Engineer Andy Palay.
Such offline features for e-mail clients have been available for years from major corporate messaging vendors such as IBM/Lotus, Microsoft and Novell. Offline capabilities are a must-have feature if Google hopes to make significant inroads with corporate customers on the back of its Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE), which includes Gmail.
“This is a major step along the way,” writes Joyce Sohn, Google Apps marketing manager on her corporate blog. She cautioned users that not all the “kinks” have been worked out yet.
Google also expects to make other aspects of Google Apps, such as Google Calendar, available offline as well. The company anticipates the rollout of offline Gmail to be complete within a few days.
Todd Jackson, Gmail’s product manager, explained that the decision to develop such a service came as a direct result of the enterprise’s demand. The company is looking to appeal to business customers and this is considered a very important step in its quest to please its customers.
Instructions on upgrading your Gmail settings to accommodate Gears, plus one of the company’s patented curtsey animated videos, are here