Google Mail goodies!

Posted on July 27, 2008 at 5:15 am

Google’s free email service Gmail has garnered lots of attention and users, both individual and corporate, since its debut. Competing against Yahoo! and Microsoft Hotmail among others, Google had to offer more to get where it is. Google continues to upgrade the service, adding new features on a regular basis.

Two significant recent changes improve your mail security and make contact management more robust.

Set Google Mail to use secure access by default

Google, like other free email services, uses the secure connection for your login to protect your identity and password, but switches to unsecured unless your specify https. That’s as far as Yahoo! or Hotmail free services go security-wise. Most other free email services don’t offer a secure email option past the login process, because it requires encryption and decryption, which in turn requires a bit more processing power – from both the server as well as your PC. It’s more overhead, and hence more expensive to provide.

But Google Gmail has always been accessible over a secure https connection with just a little manual effort. One reason Google may offer it is because their strategy is to offer a free service that is robust enough for corporate use. And the corporate IT world requires the secure option.

To use it, just use https://mail.google.com as the URL from your browser. That comes in handy when you need to check for emails from your laptop while sipping your frappucino over a public wireless connection.

Until now, you had to navigate to Gmail using that https URL. Not difficult, but you can forget, and that means you are not secure. Google is now releasing a change so that users can specify https as their default method of access. That will protect you, and it may be advisable if you are a regular public wireless user.

Google makes it optional, and turned off by default because the extra processing required can slow down your email browsing, theoretically. These days unless you are on a very old computer I don’t think you would actually be detect any difference.

To change your settings to use a secure connection by default, navigate to your Gmail Settings.

The Gmail settings page is a tabbed window format. Google is rolling the feature out gradually to users, so you may have to check back to see when your Settings / General page is updated. The box will look like this when you have it:

Just set the radio button for ‘Always use https’ and you will be given the secure connection regardless of how you bookmarked the URL, or if you click to access Google Mail from the Google search page.

According the Gmailblog, the few known issues currently are that Google Toolbar and some other apps which access Gmail will not yet use this default, and they are addressing those applications now.

Google Contacts – New Option for manual control of contact additions

Another spiffy new feature for Gmail users help to reduce Contact List clutter. Google Mail users are familiar with the clutter that Google creates in the Contact List by adding every single new email address in or out as a contact. Google Mail does not bother to ask you if you want to add a new email address as a contact, it just does it. Up until now, that is!

Google has listened to feedback. They have taken an approach that preserves the ability of Gmail to auto-complete as many email addresses as possible, but without cluttering your permanent Contact List. It does this now by adding new email addresses to the Contact List as Suggested Contacts rather than permanent contacts. The Suggested Contacts contain all the email addresses just like before, so auto-complete works just like it always did. However your permanent Contact List is not cluttered up. You can choose to add Suggested Contacts to your main My Contacts list, or not.

By default Google Mail will still move a Suggested Contact to your main Contact List based on frequent usage. If you want to have full manual control, they have added a new checkbox under My Contacts.

Uncheck the box to gain full manual control.

Now, go ahead and start making these new features work for you!

Pete Kushmeider, writer and blogger.

Technorati Tags: google mail, Gmail, mail security, gmail contacts

» Filed Under Google Software/Tips

Comments

One Response to “Google Mail goodies!”

How to change your Google-Gmail password Says:

[...] Google service that I use. And if you’re worried about security, you can read an earlier post on how to enable HTTPS in Gmail. [...]
August 5th, 2008 at 5:34 am