Enabling Gmail Offline Access

Gmail is the best online webmail by far IMHO. It’s biggest problem is that it needs to make some inroads into the business market so it can start making some money and start to push out Yahoo!Mail and Hotmail (or Live Mail or whatever Microsoft is calling it this week). Google has taken a big step towards being a viable alternative to things like Exchange or Zimbra by way of Offline Access.

Google is going to be doing a soft rollout of this labs feature so if you don’t have it yet, keep checking back. If you do have it, here’s how to enable it. I believe it will download up to 10,000 messages to your desktop, including attachments. You’ll be able to use Gmail almost exactly as you would if you were online including being able to search your mail like normal.

I’m going to be using Firefox 3.0.5 and Ubuntu 8.10 (although your OS shouldn’t make any difference since it’s dependent on Google Gears)

Installing Google Gears

1. Go to the Google Gears website and click the Install button
   
2. Click the Agree and Download button on the next screen. You may want to uncheck the ‘Help Us Improve’ checkbox if you don’t want Google to be all in your business…or something like that.
   
3. The Firefox addon box will show up. Click ‘Install’
   
4. After it’s done, restart Firefox
   
5. Firefox will restart and you should see that Google Gears is now installed
   

Enabling Offline Access

1. Login to your Gmail account and look for the green beaker to enter that ‘Labs’ area
   
2. Look for the Offline Access item and click the ‘Enable’ radio button
   
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click ‘Save Settings’
   
4. Now you should see something that says ‘Offline 0.1′ next the the green beaker you clicked earlier
   
5. A popup box will show up. Click ‘Next’
   
6. Click the box that says ‘I Trust This Site’ and then click ‘Allow’
   
7. You will see a popup box asking you if Google can create a shortcut on your desktop to Gmail
   
8. You should now see a progress bar in the upper right hand corner. This is finishing up the installation
   
9. After the installation is finished up, it will start Synchronizing your mail and then download your attachments. This is going to take some time. I would recommend going and getting a cup of coffee, or knitting a sweater
   
10. If you need to pause the sync or want to disable Offline Access for some reason, click the ‘Show Actions’ text towards the bottom right of the Sync box
    
11. Once it’s done, you should see a small green checkmark letting you know everything is now synced
    

Conclusion

There is one major thing you need to be aware of now that you’ve downloaded your mail and attachments to your desktop. This is obviously a bit of a security risk (no more than something like Exchange of course). But just be aware of this issue. I haven’t had time to look into the security implications of this, but I’ll look around and see what I can find and post my updates here.

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