If you’re like most people, you use Gmail to manage your email and calendar. But what if you want to keep your Gmail account secure? You can encrypt your Gmail account with SSL encryption, which will make it more difficult for hackers to access your account. SSL encryption is a security feature that uses a certificate to encrypt data between the browser and the website. This means that even if someone were to intercept your login information, they would not be able to read your emails or other messages. To encrypt your Gmail account, follow these steps:

  1. Open Google Chrome and sign in to your Gmail account.
  2. Click the three lines in the top right corner of the screen and select “Settings.”
  3. Under “Security,” click “Encrypt my traffic.”
  4. Enter a password and click “Create encrypted connection.” 5. Select “SSL” from the list of options and enter the URL of the website where you want to encrypt your traffic (for example, https://www.google.com). 6. Click “Create encrypted connection.” 7. In Chrome’s main window, click on the three lines in the top right corner of the screen and select “Settings.” 8. Under “Security,” click on “Advanced” 9 . In the window that opens, under “Encryption,” select “SSL” 10 . Enter a password and click on OK 11 . Your encrypted connection should now be active ..

Turning on SSL for Gmail is hardly a secret anymore, but getting the Gmail Notifier to continue to work isn’t quite as well known, so we’re covering both just for completeness. You can also think of this as a reminder to enable SSL if you haven’t already.

Thanks to Pratik for the idea for this article.

Configure Gmail to Always Use SSL

Once you login to your Gmail account, you’ll want to click the Settings link in the upper right-hand corner.

Then at the bottom of the general settings page, select the “Always use https” option, and click the Save Changes button.

That should be all you need to do… from now on you’ll be redirected to the SSL version of Gmail every time after logging in, no matter what computer you access email from.

Configure Gmail Notifier To Use SSL Encryption

As soon as you turn on the option to Always use https, you’ll notice that all of a sudden your Gmail Notifier doesn’t work anymore, because it requires a registry hack to switch the default URL to https instead of http.

In case you aren’t sure which notifier I’m talking about, here’s a screenshot:

And of course this screenshot is an excuse to use my favorite wallpaper.

Manual Registry Hack

Open up regedit.exe through the start menu run or search box, and then browse down to the following key:

Right-click in the pane on the right-hand side and create a new string with the following values:

Name: url Value: https://mail. google. com/mail/

Close and re-open the Gmail Notifier, and you should immediately be able to see your notifications again.

Downloadable Registry Hack

Google is actually nice enough to provide a downloadable registry hack to make the notifier work properly. Just extract the zip file, and double-click on the included notifier_https.reg file to turn on SSL for your notifier. There’s an included undo script as well.

Download Gmail Notifier SSL script from google.com