New Options Secure Your Gmail Connections
Time to chuck out those add-ons and Greasemonkey scripts, Gmail now offers the ability to only use https connections for secure webmail.
Security savvy readers are probably using either a Greasemonkey script or a browser add-on to do just that, but now you can control that setting from Gmail’s settings without the need for outside tools. To active https connections, head to settings and under the “general” tab at the bottom of page you’ll find the new option.
The good news is that your ability to connect via https is no longer limited to browsers with scripts or add-ons installed — it works everywhere.
Well, almost everywhere. The only caveat is for those of you with older versions of the Gmail Mobile app, which apparently doesn’t always play nice over secure connections. Google engineers are reportedly at work on the problem, but in the mean time Google recommends holding off on the “always use https” option or updating to the latest version of Gmail Mobile.
If you’re wondering why you’d want to use an https connection instead of a normal http connection the answer is that the secure connection prevents snoops from seeing your mail. If you’re at the public wifi hotspot using a plain http connection, anyone with one of the easily available snooping tools on the web can intercept and read all your mail — and that’s not good.
Why didn’t Google offer secure connections from the beginning? No idea, but at least they do now so make the change today. And remember to delete any Greasemonkey scripts or add-ons that duplicate the functionality since there could be conflicts.
[via Google Operating System]
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