More Secure GMail
July 25th, 2008 (8:00am) Mike Gunderloy 4 Comments
Google’s GMail has always used the secure https: protocol to protect logins, but it would allow you to switch to an insecure http: session after you were connected. While this can speed things up, it’s potentially a problem for those of us who are on-the-go: unencrypted mail traffic can be snooped on by anyone in WiFi range of your laptop.
That’s why its nice to see the new “Browser Connection” item in GMail’s settings; you can use this to force all of your GMail sessions to use https: throughout, no matter how you get there. This may cause a problem with some applications like Gmail for mobile, but there are workarounds. If you’re the mobile sort of web worker, you should definitely turn this setting on. Check it even if you’re deskbound: on my account the new setting defaulted to https:-only.
4 Comments Post your own comment
JT says: July 25th, 2008 11:23am
Hopefully they push this out to Pro accounts soon.
cspusa says: July 25th, 2008 2:03pm
Most people don’t know, you can force a secure session just by typing an ” s ” at the end of http as in…. “https”. simple and easy.
JT says: July 25th, 2008 2:48pm
Yeah I do that, but it will be nice to have this feature too for the times when I forget to add the s.
andrea says: July 28th, 2008 1:34pm
10x for the tip mate! I suddenly applied this setting inside my account ;-)