A day after confirming a major security breach by Chinese hackers, Google has turned on default https: access for its popular Web mail service. Google had previously added the option for GMail users to always use https back in July 2008 but it was turned off by default. A group of researchers and academics released an open-letter calling on Google to enable industry standard transport encryption technology (HTTPS) for Google Mail, Docs, and Calendar. Google Apps users whose admins have not defaulted their entire domains to https will have the same option.
Source: https://threatpost.com/gmail-goes-https-only-default-011310/73371/