LifeHacker is reporting that Google is finally enabling Google Gears support in GMail. The first question you might ask is “what the heck is Google Gears”? Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser:
DesktopLet web applications interact naturally with your desktop
DatabaseStore data locally in a fully-searchable database
WorkerPoolRun JavaScript in the background to improve performance

So when Gears is enabled you can access your Gmail from your browser any time… even when you’re not online! Essentially, Offline Gmail uses Google Gears to download all (ok not ALL, but MOST) of your email to your desktop. When you use Gmail in offline mode it works exactly the same as using it normally—except that when offline mode is enabled in your browser, Gmail is that much faster. When you compose an email in offline mode they get put in your outbox, and those emails are automatically sent once you’re back online.

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Google Groups has a post about exactly what and how much data Offline GMail will sync. In short, it definitely syncs any label that’s not too huge, was recently updated, and has some history, including the nearly-guaranteed Starred and Drafts sections. It skips un-labeled Trash and all the Spam, and any label that’s mostly unread. From the Google Group site:

Here’s a sketch of how these messages are selected:

  • Synchronization is based on the date of conversations. The system estimates a period of time to cover (at least 1 week in length) that results in approximately 10,000 messages being downloaded. For an average user, this means Gmail will end up downloading several years of mail.
  • Additionally, we’ll download any conversation marked with a label that contains less than 200 conversations, has at least one conversation that has been received in the last 30 days and also has at least one conversation that’s outside the estimated time period. For many users, this list of labels will include Starred and Drafts.
  • Finally, the system determines a list of labels to exclude conversations from being downloaded. For example, Trash and Spam are always in this list, along with any label that contains mostly unread conversations (unread count greater than 99%). So, we won’t download a conversation if it contains only labels in this list. A typical Trashed message will not be downloaded, but a Trashed message that contains the label “alpha” will.

Gears hasn’t been abled across the board. Google is slowly releasing it to the general public. As of right now… it’s not available in my GMail account but I’m anxiously awaiting it. I know Gears speeds up my WordPress administration so I can’t wait to see what it does for the already awesome GMail.

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