Goodmail Systems unveiled on Thursday its CertifiedVideo, which offers streaming video capabilities within e-mail.
Goodmail, which provides companies and nonprofits with encrypted e-mail, is adding embedded streaming video capabilities to its service.
"Americans watched more than 14 billion online videos this past January alone. With CertifiedVideo, consumers can now watch videos within their e-mail in-box without having to click to an external Web site, and brands can tap into shifting media consumption habits and craft truly interactive, e-mail 3.0 marketing campaigns," Peter Horan, Goodmail CEO, said in a statement.
AOL is the first e-mail provider to offer Certified Video. Among the companies sending footage over the e-mail service are Country Music TV, LiveNation, The New York Times, and Target.
With its CertifiedVideo service, Goodmail first analyzes a prospective sender's video player for code stability and platform compatibility, with the aim of ensuring the video can be delivered and viewed. After it's been approved, a sender can use Goodmail's CertifiedEmail system to add encrypted video tokens to outbound messages.
The outbound messages are designed to notify the recipient's e-mail provider to deliver the message directly to the recipient with the video content enabled, according to Goodmail.
Update 12:35 p.m. PDT: I clarified this post to reflect the fact that this involves encryption only between a user's browser and Gmail's servers.
Gmail now can be set to encrypt communications between a browser and Google's servers by default, an option that makes the e-mail service harder to snoop on but also potentially slower.
Users already could encrypt communications with Gmail servers (by going to https://mail.google.com), but on Thursday, the company added an option to use that encrypted connection automatically.
Gmail now can be set to encrypt communications with its users by default.
(Credit: Google)"Your computer has to do extra work to decrypt all that data, and encrypted data doesn't travel across the Internet as efficiently as unencrypted data," Gmail engineer Ariel Rideout said in a blog post Thursday. "That's why we leave the choice up to you."
The encryption comes through use of HTTPS, a secure version of the HTTP protocol that governs how Web browsers fetch information from servers. It's not simple to snoop on somebody else's network traffic, but it can be done when the communications aren't encrypted.
HTTPS encrypts communications only between the browser and Gmail's servers. It's not like PGP (nee Pretty Good Privacy) or GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) software that encrypts e-mail all the way from source to destination.
The Gmail login process is always encrypted.
(Via Google Blogoscoped.)
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