I have been using Gmail for about 2 years now. I previously used Hotmail, but I switched when Gmail started offering POP3 for free (Hotmail used to charge for POP3). In case you don't know, POP3 gives you the ability to read your email with a rich email client such as Outlook or Thunderbird. This capability was crucial to me because I needed to download all of my email so I could read it even when I was offline. Having an offline email capability for some people is a necessity. Unfortunately, some people do not want to go through all the trouble of downloading an email client and setting up Gmail for POP3 access. If you are one of those people then today is your lucky day! Gmail announced today that they are going to build offline functionality directly into their web-based email client. Basically, when you are connected to the internet Gmail will make a local copy of your messages and cache them to disk. They refer to their caching technology as Gears. This is similar to the Isolated Storage Technology that was developed by Microsoft. I would be willing to bet that the other major players in the market such as Yahoo and Hotmail will be working hard to add this capability to their web clients as soon as possible. Still don't believe me? Watch the Video!