Did you know that when you’re viewing mail in your Gmail account you’re not using a secure connection by default? That means that anyone who’s sniffing traffic on your network can intercept your packets and essentially read your email or, worse yet, steal your session (ie. login to Gmail as you)!
The chances of this actually happening to you are very slim. But Google actually offers HTTPS (ie. encrypted) access to Gmail, so why not take advantage of it? To use HTTPS, you just need to change the “http://” in the address bar to “https://” once you’re logged in and hit enter.
You need to do this ever time to log into Gmail though, which is a bit annoying. That’s why I’ve begun using the GMailSecure script for Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey is a Firefox add-on which allows you to install scripts that customize websites for you. This script simply replaces “http://” with “https://” for you whenever you’re logged into Gmail.
For any security conscious Firefox+Gmail users out there, this add-on ensures that you’re always viewing your email over a secure connection.
