Offline Gmail: Almost like the real thing

PC World - When Google Inc. launched a system for accessing Gmail without an Internet connection on Tuesday, the company promised that 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 trade-off is that you don't have access to all of your mail. For my account, the system synced up around 6,500 messages, about two months' worth of e-mail. (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 OK 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.

The system gives you status updates as it's pulling down messages, though I found some of the information to be wildly inaccurate. At one point, the status message told me that if I stopped synching now, I'd have access to messages back to Jan. 10. In fact, Gmail had copied messages back to Nov. 28 of last year.

Working with Gmail in offline mode is almost indistinguishable from working online. When you compose a message and hit Send, Gmail will put the message in your out box and send it the next time it has a connection. When you search for mail, Gmail will warn you if you're seeing only a selection of the mail that fits your search criteria and let you know that you can find more when you have a Net connection.

You can't edit your contacts while you're offline, but the system will still autocomplete addresses for people in your contact list. One surprise is that Tasks aren't available in offline mode -- that seems like it would be a fairly simple thing to sync and something that most users would want access to when they're offline.

Flaky Connection Mode seems like a real winner for anyone whose connection is at all unreliable or just slow. The system works with the local cache of data, so everything happens very fast. But Gmail still syncs with its servers whenever your connection allows, so you still get new mail and messages you compose are sent as soon as possible. As long as you don't need access to messages more than a few months old, it's the best of both worlds.