There have been a few articles critical of Google as a corporate entity lately, including a blog entry somewhere which said they didn’t pay attention to their user base.
I thought that was a bit harsh, since I consider Google my best friend. I use it in a fairly limited way. The aspects of Google that I use the most are certainly Google as a search engine, Gmail, the Reader, and news.google.com. Google analytics is also helpful. I don’t use the calendar, google documents, or many other features that have become mainstream for a good number of users.
It was with some joy that I fired up the new Gmail Offline reader feature, under the Google labs section of Gmail settings. Nice. Well, nearly nice. It doesn’t work with Safari. That’s fine. I usually use Firefox, anyway. And it doesn’t work under Mailplane, a very fine, OS X application. I’ll survive that too.
All set, the required plug in “Gears” was already on my laptop, for what, I don’t recall. Fired up, and now syncing. It says it will only sync the last 2 years of messages. Uh-oh, that may be a lot of messages. Here come thousands of messages. We’ll survive. Let’s try to clean up some old ones and put them in an archived folder. That doesn’t help. They’ll still be coming in.
And now, it decides to transfer all of my attachments. Here come 500+ attachments of varying sizes. Let’s try to find if there are options I can tune, so that the attachments don’t come, and perhaps only the last 30 days or 60 days or maybe 90 days of emails are synced.
Nope, can’t select any options. Google decides which folders will come for the past 4 years, and which for the past 2 years. It tells you that all of your attachments are on the way also and there is no off switch.
Certainly someone who used this in the non-public beta would have thought this may be a problem. This is the email service that will have a gigabyte or so of your old email sitting around. Gmail promised you’d never have to toss anything and it would always be there online. Well, now everything is there and not just online. It is sitting on whatever computer you’d like to access your Gmail account offline.
The NEXT step will hopefully be that someone with “net cred” let’s them know that a few simple user configurable options will make this fine feature even finer, more usable, and allow for a much quicker initial sync. Sooner or later my sync will be complete. I’ll be long gone though. I’m headed out into the snail world for the library. My iPhone will accompany me, gmail will be there. But, I’ll leave it alone. No kindle, no laptop, just a few real books. When I return, gmail may be all synced, or it may take a day. There is a whole lot of syncing going on. Actually since google has about 1/2 Gigabyte to sync over the DSL connection, this could take a while. But, at least it is faster than Bittorrent. Those of you using Google for storing large files offline, beware, they are coming back to you.
Treats & Eats
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The Reality: Offline Gmail seems to work excellently. It syncs just fine, allows you to search on it, just as if you were online. The suggestions of fine tuning the download suggestions above though would make it even better. Being able to choose to limit syncs to 30 days, 60 days and to limit downloading attachments to particular size limits, by days, or not at all would improve the service. Highly recommended service, if you are not able to always be online.
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