Gmail adds Automatic Email Encryption- But for a Price :-)

Don't worry Gmail fans, the price doesn't involve money; it involves performance (at least Google things so.)

From the day it launched, Gmail has supported something called "https". Https keeps your mail encrypted as it travels between your web browser and our servers, so that other's WiFi can't read it.

Encryption of your Gmail messages, as opposed to just encryption of your password when logging into Gmail, isn't new. It's been around for some time, but you had to to to a different URL, meaning https://mail.google.com.

But now, and rolling out gradually, as every new Gmail feature does, you can set all you email to be encrypted simply by changing a setting (as noted above).

Now while Google specifically warns that "Your computer has to do extra work to decrypt all that data," and that you may see a performance hit, I've never seen any difference when using https://mail.google.com. Google also says that encrypted data doesn't "travel as efficiently across the Internet," I have to say: come on. It's encrypted, but it's not like their adding 3x as much data to the data stream.

I guess it's a very good move by Google.

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Pon Paulraj