In 2008 Gmail launched the option for users to connect to the service via https – a way to protect the information exchanged between our browser and Google servers, by encrypting it.
Since the secure connection can make Gmail a little slower (encrypted data travels the web more slowly than unencrypted data), the company believed that the best thing to do would be to let the user choose how he would like to use the service.
The relationship between security and speed began to be studied by Google in the last few months and they came to the conclusion that enabling the secure connection was the best way to go.
Thus, as of today, the connection via https becomes automatic for all users.
Those who already used the connection safely, will not be affected by the change.
But users who trust their connections and feel safe to disable access via https, will still be able to do so by accessing the settings and checking the option Don’t always use https.
In this case, only the login will be done with a secure connection.
Gmail alerts, however, that offline Gmail users, at the moment, may experience problems with the move.
For more information on this issue, the Gmail team made this text available, which is available in English only.
