Apparently Gmail has been a rather favorite target for hackers especially from China so what Google did was to start encrypting Gmail through the Chrome web browsers. Basically if you see the “https” in your address bar in the Chrome browser it means that your Gmail is safe from outside eyes trying to take a peek into your inbox, however access “http://gmail.com” will lead you to the unencrypted version 0f Gmail, but that’s assuming you’re not reading your emails through the Chrome browser. According Google programmers:
“As of Chromium 13, all connections to Gmail will be over HTTPS. This includes the initial navigation even if the user types ‘gmail.com’ or ‘mail.google.com’ into the URL bar without an https:// prefix.”
Chances are that you probably don’t send highly sensitive information for work from your Gmail account but there are some small businesses who use public emails such as Yahoo or Gmail for their company’s email address, and for personal users like you and I, emails generally tend to be a private matter so I guess it’s a good thing that Google has stepped up the security of Gmail through the Chrome browser at least. In fact with the upcoming releases of Chrome notebooks now’s as good a time as any to start making sure that their services are extra secure if they’re hoping that Chrome OS will take off.