Yesterday Google made a pretty small announcement in regards to a big change (at least from my point-of-view).
The news is that they are going from non-SSL to SSL as the default option in Gmail. For those non-techies reading this, this means that instead of sending the traffic from Google’s servers to your local computer in an unencrypted form, which is vulnerable for other people to eavesdrop on your communication (eg. reading your emails as you are reading them), they are now encrypting the traffic. By doing this, it becomes fairly difficult for someone to eavesdrop on your communication (although not impossible).
For the security conscious people out there, this option have been available for quite some time (since 2008 to be precise), but it has not been enabled by default.
We here at Email Service Guide welcome this change, and we wish that other email providers took a lesson from Google in this respect. There are still email providers out there who couldn’t care less about your security. One.com for instance doesn’t even send the password encrypted when you log in, which enables anyone on the local network to obtain your password with simple software.
