Daniel Miessler posted an interesting article regarding the encryption of Gmail and other Google services communication. First the article shows using TCPdump capture why it is dangerous to not use encryption when connecting to Gmail. Then the well known workaround is described: use https instead of http when connecting to Gmail. But when using link to connect to the service, the connection may be in http. In the article and the comments, there are several suggestion to solve this problem:

• Use bookmarks made with https
• Don’t connect to the Google services through links
• GmailSecure userscript for GreaseMonkey that forces https connections on mail
• Use CustomizeGoogle Firefox’s Extension