How to Force Gmail into Offline Mode

Summary

Ken Yarmosh outlines the problem in this post: for efficiency purposes many of us want to turn of the email firehose while still maintaining connectivity for other work.

This hack works for me until Google Labs comes up with a better solution.

In a nutshell, run Gmail in another browser within a virtual machine environment and turn off internet connectivity in that environment.

How I Did It

My Environment
I’m running a MacBook Pro and use Safari as my primary application 95% of the day. I have VMWare installed and run Windows XP. In XP I use Chrome as my primary browser.

Steps
1. Get VMWare and Windows XP if you don’t have them already. Setup XP in a new virtual environment.
2. Download and install Google Chrome in XP.
3. In Windows XP log into Gmail and go to Settings->Offline->Enable Offline Mail for this computer. Install Google Gears.

4. In Windows XP Start -> Control Panel (switch to classic view) -> Network Connections
Drag “Local Area Connection” onto your Desktop to create a shortcut.
5. Double-click “Local Area Connection” shortcut when and Disable/Enable whenever you want to go offline.

It Works…Mostly
There are some annoyances – for instance switching back and forth between operating systems. And dowloading files and clicking on URLs in XP requires some cut-and-pasting.

But in the end it is totally worth it. If you are an entrepreneur time is everything.

Better Ideas?

If you have a better approach – such as how to do it under a real operating system like Linux – leave me a comment and I’ll link to it.

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