I don't think I was making any association between online & cloud that wasn't inferred from the article itself. I could be mistaken though. Desktop mail clien

I don't think I was making any association between online & cloud that wasn't inferred from the article itself. I could be mistaken though. Desktop mail clients have been queueing mail for delivery since their inception (as have MTAs but that's out of scope here). A desktop mail client also has to live in both worlds - while you have a connection you expect to be able to get near-real-time notification of new messages; yet while you're offline you expect to be able to view most of your message content as well as compose and queue messages. You more-or-less expect to be unaware that you're offline. Firefox supports an offline mode where all content is served from cache (I'm not sure if Chrome does, haven't used it recently). Switching into and out of it isn't very graceful or automatic, but it is there and fairly well done. Which leads back to my point. I agree it should be done gracefully, and will concede that the kinds of data have changed. However, at heart it has been done previously, and more-or-less gracefully. In an age of always-connected phones, web apps, and a world confined to the browser, those lessons seem to have been forgotten - I just wouldn't want to see this go the route of re-learning them from first principles.