Read and send emails when you’re offline

by Nik Rawlinson

What you need: Gmail; OneDrive; Thunderbird

Time required: One hour

I t’s easy to forget how novel it is to be online around the clock. For most of us, broadband has only been a reality for the last couple of decades, yet we now feel lost without an internet connection. No more streaming TV, no music-service subscription, and in many cases no email — as our inboxes increasingly live in the cloud. Thankfully, the latter of those is easily solved, as leading email providers like Google’s Gmail and Microsoft Outlook have offline modes which, if set up in advance of any problems, give access to your messages whether you’re online or off, at home or away. Here, we explain how to make the most of them.

1 Set up Gmail for offline access

Gmail isn’t enabled for offline use by default: you need to opt in by first logging in through a browser. You’ll need to be using a Chromium-based browser, which shouldn’t pose too much of an issue, since almost every browser is built using Chromium code . The only notable exception is Firefox. The only other requirement — aside from a Gmail account — is that you’re not using it in incognito or private browsing mode.

Log into Gmail, then click the cog top right to open its settings sidebar. Click the ‘See all settings’ button, then click Offline on the toolbar. Here, tick the box next to ‘Enable offline mail’ ( 1 in our screenshot).

If you intend to work with your email offline when you’re not connected to the internet, you’ll first need to make sure you have a copy stored on your computer.

But how much of your inbox do you need? If you’ve upgraded your Google account through Google One (https://one. google.com) and opted for the Premium plan, your inbox might stretch to 2TB, which is bigger than many hard drives or SSDs. Downloading that much data would not only be time-consuming: in many cases it would be impossible.