Gmail, now with 90% less Internet!

Gmail’s new offline mode frees you from the ticking clock of the internet café, which probably results in

• less internet money
• more beer money
• happier friends, now that you actually write to them
• happier you, now that they write back

In a nutshell

Offline Gmail stores the Gmail software and your 10,000 most important email conversations (which is probably your whole account, unless you’re particularly chatty) inside your web browser.

Web browsers aren’t designed to store data or software, so you need a special extension called Google Gears.

With the help of Gears, the Gmail software runs on your computer (instead of on Google’s servers). While you’re offline, every change you make gets saved to a database. When Gmail sees the Internet again, the changes are synchronized: emails you’ve “sent” are really sent, new messages are downloaded, etc.

Two ways to work this magic

A. Download emails directly to your laptop (Mac/Windows)

Offline Gmail was designed to be used this way. You use the web browser that’s already installed on your laptop. Just connect your laptop to the Internet (at work, public WiFi, friendly café, whatever) and:

1. open Gmail
2. click Settings
3. click the Labs tab
4. click the Enable bubble for Offline Gmail, then click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page
5. click the new Offline link in the top right

Gmail will guide you through the rest, including the installation of Google Gears.

When installation is complete, you’ll see a display that shows how many messages Gmail has downloaded to your computer. Disconnect whenever. Use offline Gmail. Next time you want to sync your changes, just connect your laptop to the Internet again and open Gmail in the same web browser. It will sync automatically.

B. Download emails to your USB flash drive (Windows only)

Think of option A as carrying around a web browser that just happens to be installed on your laptop.

Laptops are heavy and easily stolen and Internet cafés rarely let you plug them in. That brings us to option B. You still carry around a web browser, but on a flash drive. Conveniently, this allows you to plug in your flash drive and use offline Gmail on any Windows computer, wherever you happen to be.

To do so, you need Firefox Portable, a special version of the Firefox web browser that stores the program and all its settings (bookmarks, history, saved passwords, etc.) in a single folder. Because it is only available for Windows, your laptop must run Windows.

Another caveat: you need free space on your flash drive. How much, exactly? It depends on the size of your Gmail account. If you have less than 10,000 conversations (you probably do; click All Mail to check), then it will download your whole account (the size is displayed in green at the bottom of every Gmail page). Mine is about 450 MB, so when it finishes downloading, Gmail will fill about 25% of my 2 GB flash drive.

Still here? Sweet. Get on a computer with Internet access, plug in your flash drive, and do this:

1. Download the Firefox Portable installer
2. Run it. If you can’t, find yourself another Internet hookup. For [overprotective] security reasons, some places (Peace Corps office included) restrict the software that their computers are allowed to run.
3. When you are prompted to choose an install location, click Browse… and select your flash drive
4. When the installation finishes, navigate to X:\FirefoxPortable\App\Firefox\extensions, where X is the drive letter of your flash drive
5. Download and open gears.zip. Inside you will find a folder called {000a9d1c-beef-4f90-9363-039d445309b8}. Copy and paste that folder into the extensions folder.
6. Navigate back to X:\FirefoxPortable and double-click on the FirefoxPortable icon to run it
7. Open the Tools menu. You should see an item called Gears Settings (if you don’t, you probably put the contents of gears.zip in the wrong place, so go back and check).
8. open Gmail
9. click Settings
10. click the Labs tab
11. click the Enable bubble for Offline Gmail, then click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page
12. click the new Offline link in the top right

Gmail will guide you through the rest. When you see a display that shows how many messages Gmail has downloaded, you may unplug the flash drive and leave. Later, you can plug your flash drive into your laptop (or any Windows computer), run Firefox Portable from it, and use Gmail offline. Next time you open Gmail in Firefox Portable on a computer with Internet, it will sync any changes automatically.

Things better learned the easy way

• Because Google Gears stores data inside the web browser, you must always use the same web browser.
  • Laptop people, this means that if you set up offline Gmail in Firefox, it will only work in Firefox. Try to use Gmail in Internet Explorer, and you'll need to be online (you know, like normal).
  • Flash drive folks, this means that you can only access offline Gmail when you run Firefox Portable from your flash drive, and not when you use the copy of Firefox installed on your laptop.
• You will probably — at some point — forget to synchronize, and then access Gmail on an Internet-connected computer and wonder what the heck happened to all those eloquent emails you’re sure you wrote. Remember, syncing doesn’t happen until you have Internet access and you open Gmail in your offline-Gmail web browser.

Extra credit

Google Gears also enables offline access for Google Docs and Google Reader. Once you have Gears installed, simply click the Offline link in the top right of Docs, or the green circle in the top right of Reader.

For flash drive folks, consider using Firefox Portable as your main web browser. Because it stores all of its data inside the FirefoxPortable folder on your flash drive, you take your bookmarks and history with you wherever you go. You can also save passwords. You can check the “Remember my password (don’t use on public computers)” boxes, even though you are on a public computer, because all the information is stored on your flash drive. In fact, it is safer to let Firefox save your passwords than to type them, as computers in Internet cafés are often infected with software that can steal passwords by watching what you type.