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What's with the emphasis on finally? Does Hotmail have offline support? Does Yahoo Mail have offline support? Gmail is 4 or 5 years old. How old are the others?

I think the contention is that Google Gears has been available for some time now, and the most natural extension of Gears would be integration with Gmail.

Kindle 2 de Amazon desvelado : Si saliera baratillo… OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 : Versión final lista para

"Does Hotmail have offline support?"

It does.  It's called Windows Live Mail.

since Gmail has IMAP support who cares about the web interface?

You can see your labels as IMAP folder, access mail offline and all this without the headache of "beta".

Offline Gmail gives me a single, consistent UI without the need to set up mail "clients" for offline use. It eliminates the need for a mail client entirely on my PC as a matter of fact.

And if Gmail is in "beta", that means IMAP for gmail is also "beta". So adding Gmail IMAP beta to your mail client is STILL beta, and still "a headache".

One day Hotmail might catch up....or not.

Actually, the labs are beta features for a beta service.  So does that make this 2*beta or beta squared?

...All to pose the question, why the heck is gmail still beta, anyway?

even if you call me outdated I must say, accessing an email service from a browser (from 5 different browsers in fact) seem unnatural to me.

with a regular email client you start the app in the morning, put it in the corner (notification area) and you can forget that it is even running. when it is needed it warns you that you have email and that's it. no need for periodic checking in the browser, there are no ads.

web email for me is reserved for those rare occasions when I need to check email without my notebook, desktop or pda phone.

by the way, check SmarterMail Enterprise (www.smartertools.com) for a real Exchange competitor.

I won't call you outdated. Everyone has their preference.

However, with Gmail, I also start it early in the morning and it just runs minimized or behind other windows and I forget it's running. It automatically checks for news messages and gives you an audible notification as well.

It's all subjective and a matter of preference really. I still use Outlook 2007 at work with Exchange. However, they recently upgraded to Exchange 2007, improving the OWA browser client, so I am looking to switch to OWA use if they support the ability to accept/reject task and meeting requests on OWA now (I haven't looked yet).

SmarterMail is awesome

I might give this a try once I get it in Gmail Labs but I still prefer using Windows Live Mail (POP3) to send and receive emails (Gmail).

Sounds interesting if it allows me to save a local copy of all my messages but from what I've heard elsewhere (Lifehacker), it looks like Offline Gmail will only cache messages that are less than a year old.

lifehacker.com/.../how-offline-gmail-decides-which-messages-to-download

- @Waethorn: I went to reply your post on the IE8 RC1 post but Paul had closed the thread. It always happens to me! LOL

Re: The Command Bar having actions not frequently used. I agree. That's why I removed it from IE.

Windows Live Mail has been great for me when using my account on different computers, keeping a synchronized offline copy of it on each computer, and still keeping it in the cloud when I'm not near one of my computers.  Really gives you the best of both worlds, and the Windows Live Mail interface is attractive and easy to use, and includes the new Windows Live Calendar service.

The new version of Windows Live Mail works amazingly well with messages that have photos attached.

It takes the full-resolution images, uploads them to the cloud, then attaches a low resolution copy of each to the message as well as a couple of links.  It does this automatically when you attach photos.

The recipient gets the message and can see the images in the body of the message.  They're like super-sized thumbnails (not sure but probably something like 320x240 or so).  That's not the good part though.  The best part is they get a link above the body of the message that offers them a slideshow.  They click it, it takes them to a special Windows Live page with a slideshow of the images.  They can stop the slideshow, go forward or back, as well as control the speed of it.  The images are probably somewhere in the neighbourhood of 800 x 600 (that's a rough guess).  They also have links that allow them to view, and even save the full-rez copies of the photos.

I loaded this up on my father's notebook before he went away on vacation.  He has very little knowledge about computers aside from what I've taught him.  He used the old version of Windows Live Mail which offers the low-rez attachments and framing options, but no online stuff like this.  I was actually quite impressed that all he had to do was just attach the photos and the program did everything else.  The resulting message and online links are extremely user friendly too, and pretty awesome.

It actually makes photo email usable again, what with ISP's locking down email to a paltry 5-10MB per message.  Attaching full-rez photos just doesn't work.  Windows Live Mail gets around that restriction.

BTW:  The photos are stored on a temporary page when you attach them to an email.  Users don't need Silverlight to view them, unlike the slideshow option on Windows Live Photos - they just need a JS-capable browser.  The photos are not stored under any user-affiliated storage link either (like WL Skydrive).  They are held online for a period of 30 days only, afterwhich the link in the email becomes invalid.

It looks like @waethorn has taken the mantle from @mikegalos of spouting erroneous information, FUD and complete and utter garbage (fueled by a true Microsoftie's blind fanaticism).

@robertsjoe - What, pray tell, are you mumbling about? Wae has actually been more civil and informative since mikegalos went back to Microsoft. Oh, and how was school?

--tayme

Hotmale is a dud, come on. No serious tech (or other professional) uses it. Hotmale users are the AOL dummies of 2009.

"Oh, and how was school?"

He pooped his pants in joy when he found out about Apple sueing Palm over multi-touch on the Pre, and had to be sent home early."

"The Command Bar having actions not frequently used. I agree. That's why I removed it from IE."

You can't please everyone.  That's why there's customization.  You can appease most when you do UX focus groups though.

"waethorn [is] spouting erroneous information, FUD and complete and utter garbage"

Where's losta to spout out a "STFU"?

All that I talked about is features of Windows Live Mail and how to use them.  It works.  It's easy.  It's all factual information too, despite your dismay over the truth.

WLM is one of the best product Microsoft has released. I even switched from Google Calendar once WLM added a calendar.

I don't like though that WLM launches when it's closed and all I want to send an email. In OE, all I had to do was hit Win+R, type "mailto:" and then hit Enter and a OE compose window would open, not the whole email-client. That's not the case with WLM.

I still miss some features from OE but overall, I really like WLM.

"a OE compose window would open, not the whole email-client"

Office Outlook does the same as OE too.  The big problem is that it doesn't send emails immediately.  Instead, the API's send the email to your Outbox in your mailbox store, until you launch the program again.  It doesn't get sent immediately.

When you open OE or Outlook, it sends any unsent messages right away.  Sometimes too fast for you to notice.

People complained about that.  WLM fixes that issue by just having the entire program open, so that messages go out as soon as you click Send.

One thing I like is that if Windows Live Mail is installed, the email link in Messenger opens Live Mail if you use it with Hotmail.  It doesn't just take you to the Hotmail website.  I like that.  I just wish it worked with the Outlook Connector.

@Waethorn: I think if a user had set OE to send email immediately, OE would send the message as soon as the user hit Send. I mean, when I was using OE (not running) and I did a Win+R + mailto:, as soon as I Alt+S (Send) the message, it was on its way, though I first had to enter my password.

Sometimes though I would hit Ctrl+S (Save) by mistake and would have to open the whole email-client to send the message.

In WLM, I have it send messages immediately but first I need to enter my password (one time, then all messages after the first one are sent w/out having to enter my password).

More FUD from robertsjoe, again.

"I think if a user had set OE to send email immediately, OE would send the message as soon as the user hit Send."

AFAIK it works the same way as Outlook, but then I haven't used OE in years.  It has similar mail API's though, and in Outlook, the full program has to be loaded for the mail transit libraries to be running.  It was easier for them to just send the message to the Outbox folder than to dynamically load the transit libraries.

FYI:  Saving a message just puts it in your Drafts folder.  You'd have to open the program, find the message in Drafts, and then click Send.  Sending a message drops it into your Outbox, and the program works by scanning the Outbox for new messages that haven't been sent yet, or opened.  Opening a message in the Outbox will effectively prevent it from being sent.  In essence, it works the opposite way as your Inbox.