Usually if an online service such as Gmail goes offline then the blogosphere is full of people complaining. Hey, anyone care to recall the great MobileMe debacle for example?

However, Google has just announced that Gmail has gone offline and for once nobody as much as sighed, let alone blew a gasket and complained their heads off.

Yes, it would seem that the eternal Beta that is Gmail has been tweaked to include offline access.

Yes, you read that right. The online email service is now accessible offline as well.

Google says that the change has come about as a result of flights without wifi which leave you also without access to your Gmail email. This poses a problem for "those of us who get a lot of our work done online" says a Google spokesperson.

Which is why the Gmail Labs team has been working on the offline thing. Enable this and Gmail will load in your web browser without an Internet connection required. Obviously it will be missing some functionality.

Nice one Google, we love it when you add functionality to Gmail.

Send and receive being the most obvious. You will, however, be able to read existing messages, label them, archive them, compose new ones and queue them to be sent when a connection becomes available and so on.

It looks good, having been built on the same Gear platform that has added offline functionality to Google Docs and reader for example.

To go offline with Gmail you need to sign in and go to Labs via the settings option. From there just enable offline Gmail and save your changes.

Finally, click the 'offline' link to kick off a synchronisation process to get your messagebase into the correct gear.