Offline Gmail Client

A report from Hindustan Times indicates that Google has developed an offline version of Gmail and likely to be made it available within this year.

Google has previously offered an offline version of Google Reader which let your work offline using the Google Gears browser plugin. It is a definite possibility that Google is working on the offline version of Gmail but it is not confirmed from Google yet.  

Hindustan Times reported,

According to highly placed sources,  Google has developed an offline version of Gmail. Gmail Offline will allow users to browse, reply, save drafts and do everything that currently Gmail does in an offline mode even when you don’t have an Internet connection. On current indications, this would mean that you would download a software client for this. When you get online your Gmail client would automatically synchronise (sync) with the Gmail server (network computer) and send and receive e-mail. A Google spokeswoman in India officially denies such a thing but there is ample evidence to believe Gmail Offline is in fact a reality and may soon be hitting a browser close to you. This has tremendous implications for corporate e-mail, but more on that later.

What is Google Gears who is powering the offline tools of Google?

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. It is still in Beta phase. Gears provides three key features:

• A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server
• A database, to store and access data from within the browser
• A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background