Gmail is my new email client after 5 years on Microsoft Outlook. One of the knocks against Gmail was that you couldn’t use it offline. Not anymore. Offline Gmail has been available via Gmail Labs for over a year, and now is a fully supported feature of Gmail. File attachments are also available for offline viewing. Gmail has all the features I need to handle my heavy email usage. One of the great features of Gmail is automatic consolidation of conversations into one thread. I didn’t really appreciate that feature until my departure from Microsoft when my email inbox was flooded with messages many with the same subject line. Gmail made it easy to manage.
To set up Offline Gmail simply click the Settings link in the top-right corner of Gmail. Click the "Offline" tab. Select "Enable Offline Mail for this computer." Then click “Save Changes”. It will take a few minutes to download all your emails and attachments the first time. After that it will happen automatically in the background.
New features every week, not once every 3 years – Gmail Labs has 54 features currently available for testing and use. Because Gmail is a cloud application it can be updated with new features continuously. Client based applications like Microsoft Outlook only release once every 3 or 4 years, so there can be a long wait for new features. One of the cool new features available from Gmail Labs is called “Mark unread from here”. Sometimes email threads can get pretty long…too long to read in one sitting.
When you enable Mark Unread From Here from the Labs tab under Settings, you'll see a new "Mark unread from here" option in the drop down menu found in the upper right-hand corner of messages. 
Clicking this option on a message tells Gmail that you want that message to be the first one you see when you reopen the thread later, with all messages after it open for easy reading. So, when you leave partway through reading a long thread, figuring out where to start reading again is easy. Give it a try and share your thoughts.
Check out the Google Apps blog for news, trips, and updates from the Google Apps team, and check out the Gmail Labs stuff by clicking on “Settings” in Gmail and Selecting “Labs”.
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