One of the things holding many people back in moving from a desktop email client like Outlook of Apple Mail to a Web-based email solution like Gmail is offline access. The ability to search email messages when there’s no Internet connection is critical for some people.
Being able to use downtime like airline travel can be a great way to get caught up on replies to outstanding messages, without paying the extra fee for inflight WiFi.
Gmail supports offline access to emails. Of course to use it, you’ll need to do a little configuration on your computer first.
To enable offline access to your Gmail, for email access on a plane or anywhere else, you need to sign in to your Gmail account, click on the Settings link, and then click on See All Settings.
Once you’ve completed this step, click the new Offline section near the far right side of the Settings list.
After checking the Enable offline mail checkbox, several other settings will appear. For instance, you can choose between 7, 30, and 90 days of offline email. Attachments can be downloaded along with mail or you can leave them in the cloud.
The last choice is definitely an option between security and convenience. You need to choose whether the offline mail stays on your hard drive after you logout of your account. If you have hard drive encryption turned on, it’s probably fairly safe to leave you mail on the drive, but if not, anything sensitive you downloaded might be at risk.
What’s cool about offline sync is it warns you how much of your data is synchronized if you disconnect, so if you’re in a hurry to get out the door, you can grab the most recent stuff and have a good chance of getting those critical emails. Overall this is a big win for getting things done on a plane. Somewhat recently, Google Workspace also added support for offline mail, but if your adminstrator doesn’t allow it, you’ll see a message like this instead.
