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.
There are quite a few crappy email providers out there. If you did not pay attention when you chose your email provider, chances are that your email provider sucks. I’ve compiled a brief check-list for you that you can use to determine if your email provider sucks and that it’s time to move elsewhere.