Rumors of offline support for GMail are making the rounds again this morning. The Hindustan Times claims that unnamed sources at Google say offline support will be added "later this year."
The Hindustan Times says that an offline version of GMail has already been built and is in an internal testing phase.
Certainly it's no secret that, with Google Gears, offline GMail is very likely to arrive at some point. Google Reader already has offline support via Google Gears, and many third party apps, like Zoho Writer, have implemented offline versions of web apps.
While certainly many would welcome offline GMail and it would be a first in the online e-mail market, in some sense there already is offline GMail — it's called your desktop e-mail software.
Like many, I use GMail, but I also use Thunderbird to ensure that I have a backup copy of all my e-mail (actually I have GMail set up to forward to an IMAP account as well — you can never have too many backups). With this set-up, which seems to be pretty common, offline GMail isn't particularly necessary and even if it does arrive later this year, it doesn't solve your backup needs.
Still, there's no doubt that offline GMail would be a feather in Google's cap. I've put in an e-mail to my contacts at Google, but so far there's been no response. I'll be sure to update this post as soon as I hear anything.
Update: Google's official statement on the matter: "we're always looking at ways to improve Gmail, but we have nothing specific to announce at this time."
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