Secure your life, secure your email : Locking down Gmail.
I use Gmail for 80% of my email needs, wait, nope it’s 100% when you count Goole Apps. I use Gmail and Google Apps for many reasons but the biggest reason has to be accessibility. The fact that I can check my email from anywhere that has an Internet connection makes my life much easier but there is one major drawback to this; when you login to an unsecured website you’re sending all of your login information in free text.
Basically this means that your information(username & password) is sent over the network in the same way you entered it, aka plain text. If there is someone on that same network with the appropriate tools they can easily “sniff” your information and then use that to gain access to your email. How do you stop this? The easiest way is to not use open networks. An open network is any network that other people have access to(usually without a password but not always) and wireless networks are the biggest culprits of this. For example, if you go in Starbucks and login to their network theoretically if someone in that shop wanted to they could see your naked data bits of data and steal your info. So, the simple way to keep your data safe is to not use these networks, but that’s not very practical consider these networks were put in place to make our lives more convenient.
The second more practical way to keep your data safe is to make sure you’re using a secure connection. This can easily be done my accessing your email using their secure site(https) verses their unsecured site(http). For example if you usually access Gmail via http://www.gmail.com simply add an s after the http and you’re now on their secure site(https://www.gmail.com). This trick will work with most online email services, Hotmail, Yahoo mail and many others and it’s an important step when you’re accessing your email from a non-secure location.
You might be wondering why they don’t force their users to use their secure connections if it’s safer. Well, the simple answer is when you use a secure connection you put more strain on the server thus making the server work harder slowing everything down. When you use a secure site you will notice a small speed decrease because your data is being encrypted and decrypted on the fly to make sure if someone does get a hold of it they can’t read it. Not only does it take computer power to encrypt and decrypt the data but encrypted data is also larger in size(bytes) so it takes more time to send and receive it as well. So, if you’re on a safe networking it might be more efficient to use the unsecured connection but if you don’t care about speed or you’re in a location that might not be secure(Starbucks, library, train) you should use the secure connection when possible.
Tip: This works for many commercial applications out there not just email ones. Next time you login to you favorite online application check to see if they have a secure connection.
I get the part of adding the s after http but what if you have a few gmail accounts and use Microsoft outlook. How can I access the secure site this way.
Warmest Regards
Mark