After months of experimenting and anticipation, Google finally feels confident enough to release offline GMail feature into the wild. Gmail engineer Andy Palay said in a post on the company’s offical blog yesterday that Google has been testing the offline version of Gmail for some time.

However the main difference is speed. Regular Gmail is generally fairly quick, but you can still find yourself waiting at times for it to check in with Google's servers. In offline mode or the very cool Flaky Connection Mode, everything from opening messages, searching for information to labeling missives happens almost instantly, since all the data is local. "This is a feature we've heard loud and clear the enterprise wants," said Todd Jackson, Gmail's product manager.

Offline access to Gmail from Google has long been expected. In 2007, the company introduced a set of programmer tools called Google Gears, which allow developers to adapt Web programs so they can be used offline. Google has made its blog reading service, Google Reader, and its suite of office software, Google Docs, accessible offline. It has long said that offline access to Gmail was in the works.

Once Gears is installed and offline access is enabled, the software automatically detects when a person's network connection is working. If the network is good, Gmail works as usual. If it's bad, it goes into offline mode, sending unsent messages and retrieving new ones when the connection is restored.

When enabled, offline Gmail begins by downloading, in the background, a copy of a user's archive to the user's personal computer. But the software stores about 10,000 e-mails, so heavy users won't get a complete archive.