The feature was one of the most requested

Nov 25, 2009 07:42 GMT  ·  By

Google would love a world where everyone is online all the time. In fact, it's basing all of its strategies on this. We're not quite there yet, so, in the meantime, it's working on making its services available when offline. Gmail makes it possible to work offline with a Google Gears version of the service that has been available since earlier this year. But it's not a complete stand-in for the regular version and one of the most requested features has been the ability to send offline attachments, something Google has finally introduced.

“One of the most requested features for Offline Gmail has been the ability to include attachments in messages composed while offline. Starting today, attachments work just the way you would expect them to whether you are online or offline (with the exception that when you're offline you won't be able to include inline images). Just add the attachment and send your message,” Andy Palay, software engineer at Google, wrote.

First things first, if you want to send offline attachments, you need to enable offline access in Gmail. Before you can enable the Labs feature, you need to have Google Gears installed for your browser, which you can get here. Gears is built into Google Chrome, so you can skip this step if you use this browser. Then, go to the Labs tab in the Gmail settings section and right at the top there will be the Offline Gmail feature.

Google says that all the emails you create will go through the Outbox, regardless of whether you're online of offline and the attachments will be uploaded even if you get disconnected during the process. As soon as you're online, your emails and attachments will be sent and everything else will be synced to the Gmail servers.

Offline access in Gmail can be a useful feature for heavy email users, but, for everyone else, there isn't a real need for it. However, this sort of functionality is very important for Google, especially now that it's building a web-based operating system, Google Chrome OS. With every app for Chrome OS being a web app, it's important to have some functionality when you don't have an Internet connection. For now, this means using Google Gears, but the company is working with other browser makers and people in the industry to introduce some features in the upcoming HTML 5 standard, which would allow websites to store data and function offline.