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New Feature Lets You Check Your Gmail Offline

by Lee Bains on January 28, 2009 at 11:02 AM


Users of Google's Gmail service can now check their e-mail without an Internet connection, Gmail engineer Andy Palay announced yesterday afternoon via the Offical Gmail Blog.

The feature, which doesn't seem to be showing up in our Gmail Labs yet for some reason, depends upon a program called Gears that downloads and regularly updates a cache of your Gmail messages. So, while your computer is connected to the Internet, it's constantly downloading your Gmail information without your explicit direction. As a result, you will be able to peruse your up-to-date e-mail page in the event you lose a connection.

With the feature, users will be fully able to read, delete, save and send mail -- Google Gears waits for a connection to be established before pushing the offline Gmail commands through. With as much time as we spend on the road, in the air, and generally scrounging for neighbors' Wi-Fi scraps, we can't think of any reason not to give this feature a shot. Aside from it not being available, that is. [From: Official Gmail Blog]


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Tags: breaking news, BreakingNews, email, gmail, gmail labs, GmailLabs, google, google labs, GoogleLabs, new products, NewProducts, offline, wi-fi

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