John Milner.

Offline gmail

I was really happy when Gmail released its offline mail app for chrome. Offline access to my mail account has always been a problem. Lately, I’ve been using Sparrow as a solution, but it comes with the overriding native client problem, you need to sync it. Since installing the offline gmail chrome app I haven’t really had the need to use it. In fact since I hadn’t used it at all I was going to uninstall it in an effort to keep chrome running efficiently. That is until today. I’ve almost entirely neglected my inbox for the last few days, too many other things going on. Today, I knew I was going to have some free time in the afternoon and decided to utilize that time to process my inbox. I hopped down to my local Starbucks only to find the wifi was absolute shit (if you could even connect). No worries, I opened up offline gmail, my entire inbox (and commonly used labels) was synced to when I last had a connection (in the background). Perfect! I spent the next few hours processing email in a surprisingly efficient manner. Since I didn’t have a connection I could only write a response and could not look at pictures or get sidetracked on some website. Sure there were a few messages that i saved to revisit when i reconnected, but in general using the offline gmail client, offline, was a very efficient way to process email. The app is very clean and distraction free and fast. Sorry to those of you I email frequently as I’m sure i blew up your inboxes at one time. The one downside, my address book is not available offline, thankfully apple address book is. posts