REST-based Offline e-Mail System

Abstract

Over the years the Internet has grown from a research tool to a worldwide communication medium. One of the applications that has grown up with the Internet is e-mail. e-Mail has become an indispensable tool for both corporations and individuals, and web-based e-mail systems have become very popular. However, a major problem with web-based email is we cannot access them when not connected to the Internet. We have built an off-line web-based e-mail system to overcome this issue, and to provide fast response even over slow connections. This system is based on Representational State Transfer (REST) and maintains HTML5 local storage to store mail and meta-data in the browser without installing any plug-ins. The system records all user actions locally and synchronizes with the server when connected to the Internet.