Andy Gambles

Within minutes there were thousands of messages on twitter about the outage. Users complaining they could not access email and get on with their daily lives. I use Google Apps for my email and all company emails. For those of you that do not know Goole Apps is basically Gmail but using our own domain.

But I remained largely unaffected by the Gmail outage. I was still able to access my email via the web interface without interruption. I am not a magician or an amazing routing expert. I simple used the Google Labs Offline option. This is basically an option in Gmail which downloads your emails so you can access them offline. To enable this simply log into Gmail then click (Top right of screen) Settings > Labs.

Enable the feature and Google will start installing Google Gears and then synchronising your mail. Gmail will then maintain an offline copy of your email. You get a small green circle next to the Settings link which shows when mail is synchronising and contains a tick when complete.

When Gmail went offline I simple switched to "Unstable connection mode". This effectively puts Gmail offline checking for new mail every few minutes.

I did this by clicking on the Sync status icon and then clicking "Go into Unstable Connection Mode". I was then able to continue using Gmail just as though I was online without any problems.

If you have any questions or comments you are welcome to post them below!