Securely browse your Gmail

by Tim Dupree at 7:00 am on May 16th, 2008 | 4 comments

Gmail LogoEver looked at your address bar while reading your email in Gmail and noticed that the page wasn’t encrypted (“http” and not “https”)? Google sends you to a secure page to login, but by default sends you to an un-encrypted page to view and send emails.  I’m not too sure why they do this, but there is a simple hack around it.

If you want to always browse your e-mail with high-grade encryption (AES-256 256 bit),  a more secure encryption than most banks use, just change you Gmail bookmark to point to https://mail.google.com/mail/.  You will be sent to a secure page to login, and once you are authenticated, you session will remain encrypted while you read/send mail.

Update: Google added the ability for Gmail users to always have https enabled.  You can enable this feature by clicking on “settings” at the top of the page and choosing “Always use https” under “Browser Connections”. You can read the google blog post about it here.  You can read the instructions on how to do it here.

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4 Responses to “Securely browse your Gmail”

  1. I changed my gmail bookmark to the encrypted link. Thanks for the advice, I’m glad my email is secure now!

    1. bdupree,  May 25th, 2008 at 6:59 pm

  2. you’re welcome!

    2. Tim Dupree,  May 25th, 2008 at 7:03 pm

  3. Google added an option in settings to always use https (after login). So if you toggle that to on, even if you log in on http (yea, you’re username/pw aren’t encrypted), you’re browsing experience is after that.

    3. Justin,  October 13th, 2008 at 3:38 pm

  4. @Justin Yeah, I’ve been meaning to add an update to this post to let visitors know about it. Thanks for getting me off my laurels ;)

    4. Tim Dupree,  October 13th, 2008 at 6:12 pm

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