Ummm, IMAP? Reading the article, this was my first thought: email applications like IMAP clients that work offline are the perfect example of this philosophy.

Ummm, IMAP? Reading the article, this was my first thought: email applications like IMAP clients that work offline are the perfect example of this philosophy. If you can't access your mail provider, you still have all the data from the last time you did, you can search old emails because they're stored locally (you can set how much you want to keep for these situations), and you can write an email and it will be stored in the outbox to be sent when connectivity is restored. In other words, your email experience is exactly the same as with connectivity, except for a banner that reminds you that it hasn't been able to download new mail since HH:mm.