The folks at Gmail Labs have been busy and they’re now dishing out offline access to Gmail.

 On enabling offline access, Gmail will load in your browser even if you don’t have an Internet connection. You can read messages, star, label and archive them, compose new mail and messages ready to be sent will wait in your Outbox until you’re online again.

It’s built on the Gears platform, which has already been used to offline-enable Google Docs, Google Reader, and other third-party web applications

To get started with offline Gmail –

– Sign in to Gmail and click ‘Settings’.
– Click the ‘Labs’ tab and select ‘Enable’ next to ‘Offline Gmail’.
– Click ‘Save Changes.’
– In the upper righthand corner of your account, next to your username, there will be a new ‘Offline’ link. Click this link to start the offline synchronization process.

Standard Edition users can follow these instructions immediately, while Premier and Education Edition users will first need their domain admins to enable Gmail Labs from the Google Apps admin control panel.