With the recent announce­ment of SF Reverse Engi­neer, Mike Per­ry, intend­ing to release his Gmail Account Hack­ing Tool to the pub­lic, there is no bet­ter time than now to secure you Gmail con­nec­tion by using the Google’s pro­vide SSL.

To do so, do the fol­low­ing:

1. Click on SETTINGS (top-right of the Gmail page). It will look some­thing like this:

   

2. Scroll all the way down, or try to find “Brows­er con­nec­tion”
3. Select “Always use https”, and the “Save changes”

   

You might have to refresh/reload your Gmail page. To ver­i­fy, you may look at your Address Bar and it should sim­i­lar to the fol­low­ing:

You will also notice that the brows­er win­dow’s SSL con­nec­tion icon has been enabled/locked. In Fire­Fox, its on the bot­tom-right of the Sta­tus Bar.

Do note that if you are also using Gmail via Google Apps for work, or what have you, forc­ing SSL con­nec­tion is cur­rent­ly not avail­able. But alas, Google does have it on their to-do list last month. Hope­ful­ly, they can see the urgency and add it on some­time soon due to Mike Per­ry’s announce­ment.

But for now, you can just man­u­al­ly change the URL from hav­ing “http” to “https”. Or, if you are using Fire­Fox (which you should), you might grab this Grease­mon­key plu­g­in called GMailSe­cure. You will just need to add your Google Apps’ Gmail URL to its “Includ­ed Page” list under GMailSe­cure’s options. For exam­ple,

http://mail.google.com/a/company-domain.com/*

Fur­ther read­ing about this sub­ject can be done via Web­mon­key’s arti­cle, Why You Should Turn Gmail’s SSL Fea­ture On Now.

I hope that helps.