Download Squad

Online productivity app makers Zoho have publicly rolled out Zoho Mail, a webmail application that's been in private beta up until today. While the world may not really need yet another webmail app, there are a few things that make Zoho Mail a notable challenger to offerings from Google, Yaho!, Microsoft, and AOL.

First and foremost, Zoho Mail offers an offline mode thanks to Google Gears. If you have Gears installed for Internet Explorer or Firefox, you can configure Zoho to download your most recent email messages and attachments so you can catch up on your email when you're stranded somewhere without an internet connection. Yahoo! offers a similar feature, but despite the fact that Zoho Mail's offline access is powered by Google Gears, Google's Gmail does not have an offline mode... yet.

Zoho Mail also has a user-friendly interface that, like many other Zoho Office apps, feels more like a desktop application than a web app. You can sort messages by labels, Gmail-style. And there are a bunch of options for customizing your display. For example, you can open emails in a split-pane mode or in a pop-up window.

There's also a "send mail as" option that lets you change yoru reply to address. In other words, if you decide that you like Zoho Mail but don't want to bother letting everyone know that you have another new email address, you can just forward your old email account to Zoho Mail and change your Email ID so that nobody will ever know the difference.