Comments on: Keep your Gmail transmissions secure

Set Google's mail service to encrypt all connections to your in-box.

[fuzzyBSc]

Your email isn't really secure unless you encrypt it at the source using a Public Key Infrastructure or similar. SMTP itself is generally cleartext. Your secure network sends email over an possibly-encrypted link to a server that is hopefully either a google server or a server at your ISP. It may forward it on, etc. Encrypting your access to your mailbox doesn't help if someone has already intercepted your mail before it reached the mailbox as it passed from server to server.

The potential security problem doesn't end when the mail arrives at google's servers. Anything you can access through the gmail web interface (http or https) is likely also to be accessible to a subset of google's staff. Hopefully they are all good people, but how do you go about rating the risk of a bad apple?

[restoration85]

Quote: "Anything you can access through the gmail web interface (http or https) is likely also to be accessible to a subset of google's staff. Hopefully they are all good people, but how do you go about rating the risk of a bad apple?"

Along that same kind of fear is the ability for a small group of network admins in a large company having access to workers' email. Often admins of a HRIS also have access to email. At some point individuals must trust that others are doing their job and accept the possibility of some privacy invasion.

[toddmw]

Strangely, when you use Google Apps for your domain, you don't get the option.

[shirgall]

Because you get https by default. You'd only need this option to disable it.