We’ve covered about smart compose feature in Gmail that lets you draft emails quickly, another new feature -offline email -is now available for testing in the Google email service. So you don’t have to be using Gmail offline app. Google has brought the native offline feature to the new Gmail. The feature disabled by default, works currently in Chrome 61 or higher version, provided you need to visit Settings and enable it on your account, find out more on offline feature in Gmail below.
Enable Gmail offline for your account
1. Ensure you’re using the new Gmail, sign into it,
2. Click on gear icon and select Settings
3. Click on Offline tab and check ‘Enable offline email‘.
Turning on the offline feature in Gmail opens offline settings and shows
a. How much of storage space on your computer is being used for offline email out of (available) 6 GB.
b. Sync Settings allow you to set how many days of emails you want Gmail to store on your computer. By default, Google email service stores last 30 days of emails and attachments. You can set offline content storage duration to last 7 or 30 or 90 days.
READ: 5 Productive Tips You can use with Attachments in Gmail
Tip: If you want to reduce storage space/Gmail offline content on your computer, uncheck ‘Download attachments’ and set storage duration to 7 days.
c. Gmail gives full control whether to keep offline data on the device or get it removed when you logout, but it does take a few hours for data to be resynced from mailbox to your computer when you enter into your account again.
Here are the options: Keep offline data on your computer: ‘Data stored on your device will not be deleted when signing out of your Google account or when changing your password. To delete account data from your device disable offline mail and save changes’.
Not recommended on a shared computer. If you’ve no privacy concerns ,you can allow Gmail to store offline data on your computer.
Remove offline data on my computer. ‘Data will need to be resynced to your computer when logging back into Gmail. It may take a few hours to resync the mailbox’.
Best option even on shared device.
4. After going through the above settings, click ‘Save Changes’.
Once done, Gmail begins the syncing process as it downloads emails and attachments according to setting set by you and when the syncing is complete, shows’ Ready for offline’ icon near the gear icon.
Note: For offline capabilities to work correctly in Gmail, Google recommends users to keep only one Gmail tab open in the browser.
Gmail offline supported browsers
As mentioned above the offline feature in Gmail, requires Chrome 61+. The feature may also work on Chromium based Vivaldi and Opera browsers. Other popular browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Firefox and Internet Explorer are unsupported.
When you try to turn on offline email for Gmail in an unsupported browser you’ll receive this message:
“The browser you are using is missing some features required to enable offline. To enable offline, you must use Chrome with version 61 or higher”.
READ: How to disable unsupported browser message in Vivaldi browser
How to disable Gmail offline and further delete data stored on your computer
1. Sign into Gmail account
2. Gear icon > Settings > Offline
3. Uncheck ‘Enable offline Email’ and save the changes.