Comments for Zoho Mail Gets Offline Support via Google Gears - Ahead of Gmail

Zoho Mail Gets Offline Support via Google Gears - Ahead of Gmail

2008-10-10T07:13:15Z

Innovative Web Office startup Zoho has beaten Google to the punch again, announcing offline support for the newly public Zoho Mail tonight. Ironically Zoho is using Google Gears to enable offline functionality in Zoho Mail - see the video below by the Google Developer team. Zoho also beat Google to offline support in online word processing, again using Gears, by launching that functionality in November 2007. Google followed up with offline support for Google Docs at the end of March 2008.

]]> We wrote in July about speculation that Google will start rolling out offline support for both Gmail and Google Calendar through Google Gears within the next six weeks. Didn't happen.

However Yahoo Mail did come up with offline functionality in July - it gave offline access to all free and paid Yahoo Mail users through the Yahoo Zimbra Desktop. Earlier this week Yahoo announced further Zimbra integration, this time with its Calendar app.

So Google is well and truly behind the times with offline support for web mail. However the Google white coats are having a fine old time tinkering with mail stuff in their labs - tonight Google Labs announced Advanced IMAP Controls, which lets you "fine-tune your Gmail IMAP experience."

To be fair, Google probably isn't worried about Zoho coming out with offline functionality in its mail product before Gmail has. For one thing Google is so big it can afford to wait until it's good and ready, despite Gmail fans yearning for offline support! But also Google probably sees Zoho less as a competitor at this point (even though Zoho does compete directly against Google Apps) and more as an evangelist for its technology - such as Google Gears.

To access mail offline in Zoho Mail, you'll need Google Gears installed on your browser - at this point IE and Firefox are supported. Chrome and Safari support is coming. According to Zoho's blog, you can also download images and attachments in offline mode. Another cool feature is that Zoho Mail automatically detects your connectivity and switches to online/offline modes.

Here is the video, also available on Google Code blog:

Comment from rama on 2008-10-10

2008-10-10T13:22:25Z

wow, defeated using its own gun.. sad. Great move by Zoho.

Comment from Lightning Fast on 2008-10-10

2008-10-10T13:34:36Z

This is bad to know that Zoho is depended on Google.

Comment from Justin Taylor on 2008-10-10

2008-10-10T14:34:26Z

Google Gears coming for Safari? I've been using it on my Mac for about 5 weeks now!

Comment from Jack Walker on 2008-10-11

2008-10-11T18:00:24Z

Do you really think a company such as ZOHO would come up with an off line functionality for their email application before Google? It is just a strategic move, Google is already testing this since way back but they want the others to suffer the learning curve. You are so naive...

Comment from Richard MacManus on 2008-10-12

2008-10-13T01:57:39Z

Oh how I love condescending commenters, especially when they fail to read the post fully. Jack, see the third-to-last paragraph of this post.

Now go and wallow again in your glorious superiority over everyone else (my bet is you work on Wall St).

Comment from gene on 2008-10-16

2008-10-16T08:27:21Z

most of the google gears offline database API has been included in the HTML5 spec - which firefox and webkit have implemented ( the local db storage ) in the latest nightly builds. It should be trivial to 'switch' from the gears API to the html5 spec.

this is probably the only way to move the web forward - write proprietary extensions, but be open about it, then have other vendors implement the spec, and finally, retroactively include it in the html spec. google/firefox/apple/webkit/mozilla have been pushing in this same direction.

so ironically - to get the ball rolling, the best way is to use proprietary extensions! (and hope microsoft implements it )