Offline Gmail is Excellent

I think you are going to find you like Offline Gmail. Why its fast.

The article below is also excellent. Good information with good explanation.

clipped from www.pcworld.com When Google yesterday launched a system for accessing Gmail without a Net connection, they promised it would act almost exactly like regular Gmail. From my early testing, it seems like that claim isn't entirely true -- in some ways, offline Gmail actually works better than the online version. 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 -- opening messages, searching for information, labeling missives -- happens almost instantly, since all the data is local. You turn on offline capability through Gmail Labs. If you haven't already, you'll need to install Google Gears, the background system that enables offline capability in services like Google Documents and Zoho Mail. Once you okay Gmail using Gears, it'll start downloading messages