Another one of GMails labs features to “graduate” and become a part of GMail is now the GMail offline feature. For those who have never tried the Labs feature, GMail’s offline Labs feature allowed you to use GMail even while offline using Google Gears.
Using the offline features you can use your GMail like any other email client like Thunderbird or Mail, or KMail. The offline feature has been available from quite some time, and has been adding features, the most recent of which is support for adding attachments to email even while offline. Now the feature will form a part of GMail for all users, and can be enabled from the settings page.
GMail’s offline feature is quite useful even if you aren’t interested in being able to access your email offline, as it caches the interface on locally, leading to much faster loading times for GMail even when you’re online. Using Flaky connection mode, GMail will restrict its online activities making the experience faster while still syncing your changes in the background.
GMail offline also lets you specify how many of your emails (based on age) should be downloaded for offline access on a per-tag basis. You can also set a maximum attachment size for download.
This functionality is especially useful with Google Chrome’s “Create application shortcuts” option which will then let your use GMail in its own window making it behave even more like an offline application.
GMail Labs still has a wealth of great features awaiting graduation. Which one do you think should be next? Comment below.