Google announced that they will be providing a way to get to your Gmail even is you don’t have an internet connection. From Google’s blog:
Web-based email is great because you can check it from any computer, but there’s one little catch: it’s inherently limited by your internet connection.
By using a google application called Gears, you are able to store a copy of you gmail to your local machine. It will automatically switch between “online” and “offline” if you have an unrelaiable internet connecetion. According to the blog, the feature should eb avaible in the next fw days. This would be handy for those of us who use gmail as a searchable repository.