Gmail Now Uses https by Default

Posted by jonathan at 2:37pm EST on 01/13/2010

The Gmail blog announced yesterday that they were moving to default https access for Gmail users.

I’ve been using this feature for quite some time just because I’m a little anal with security.

Here’s what Gmail Engineering Directory, Sam Schillace, has to say about it:

In 2008, we rolled out the option to always use https — encrypting your mail as it travels between your web browser and our servers. Using https helps protect data from being snooped by third parties, such as in public wifi hotspots. We initially left the choice of using it up to you because there’s a downside: https can make your mail slower since encrypted data doesn’t travel across the web as quickly as unencrypted data. Over the last few months, we’ve been researching the security/latency tradeoff and decided that turning https on for everyone was the right thing to do.