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Comment by marcin | Hacker News Reader

Gmail is clearly more of a beta than a functional product (namely attachements don't seem to work), but the biggest question/implication of this change I see is evaporation of any business model (as in 'the ads are gone').

Besides that - I like the UI a lot, but for any offline access to make sens it has to be rock solid (which this obviously isn't).

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(Offline Gmail team member here)

Attachments should work, with a few caveats. Due to some annoying quirks of the HTML5 FileSystem API, there's a whitelist of supported file extensions. This includes everything useful we could think of, but it's not exhaustive.

Are screensavers considered useful?

The specific requirement for being whitelisted is that it shouldn't have a MIME type that Chrome wants to open inline. Give me a list of extensions that you'd like to see supported and I'll see what I can do.

Screensavers are just special exes on Windows and are commonly used as viruses. Might be better not to whitelist that one and instead convince people to zip them up if they really want to send them.

I think that there are a fair number of mail filters that block .scr entirely, anyhow. In that respect, they're similar to .bat, .vbs, .wsh and the like.

Alternatively, you can just offer to automatically zip those for the user. Actually, that might be a good idea for all unrecognized files because it avoids a lot of weird problems with funny extensions that are automatically blocked.

Feel free to use that idea.

gmail does not allow executable attachments - even when zipped, it will inspect the inside of the zip file and reject the executable.

As a developer who sometimes have to send a zipped project with a compiled build inside, I find this "feature" extremely annoying. I usually end up renaming the file from .zip to .lol or similar.

Switch to 7zip. It is more efficient than zip and it passes through Gmail fine and you then don't need to worry about renaming files

Thanks for commenting here. Would HTML or JS attachments be whitelisted?

No, since they can be opened inline.

Is it wise to pursue a whitelist approach?

> I like the UI a lot

My experience was the opposite, unfortunately. Why can't the offline gmail application use the same UI as the online one? To me, that would be the obvious way of doing it.

the biggest question/implication of this change I see is evaporation of any business model (as in 'the ads are gone').

You can use Gmail with AdBlock or through a POP or IMAP client, too. I think Google will survive.

Adblock? Please. POP / IMAP - valid points. But this is slightly different - it's a product they designed from scratch, control the UX etc. Still - no business model.

Perhaps they figure it is better for users who need to reach their email while offline to use Google's offline web app occasionally instead of moving to POP/IMAP altogether.

in an offline mode how would you monetise offline ad clicks? google's business model is based on ctr not cpm. are you thinking of caching ads/pages too?

Deck is doing that somehow (caching ad impressions at least) - so it is an addressable issue. However - this app works both in online and offline mode, so my point was not really touching the offline ad problem - thanks for pointing it out.

I don't imagine they need to monetise this part. The offline app simply makes Gmail even better and gives those who use desktop clients one less reason to stick with them. As a result of this more people will end up using the normal online app and therefore clicking more ads.

The thing is - with the new interface, that is perfectly accessible through the browser AND makes sure your offline is in-sync why would people carry on using the regular version?

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