Offline Gmail All Grown Up, Out of Labs

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 7:33 pm

Has it really been a year since Google rolled out Offline Gmail? The exceedingly useful feature allows users to compose, sort, and search mail when no internet connection is available. Now Offline Gmail is leaving Google Labs and becoming a permanent part of the Gmail experience. The feature, as implemented, uses Google Gears to create a local storage cache. This is somewhat interesting given Google’s plans to ditch Google Gears and move to HTML5. Will the offline features be updated prior to the release of Chrome OS?

Coinciding with Offline Gmail’s departure from labs, Google has added two new features that were requested by users during the testing period. Gmail will now allow users to decide which messages are downloaded for offline use. You can now also queue up attachments to mail while offline.

If you haven’t been using this feature in the labs, you’ll still need to enable it in settings. If you’ve been using it this past year, what’s your experience been like?