Google has made a change to the way Gmail works at the very same time that it announced the change in policy. The change means that your email remains encrypted as it whizzes between your laptop and Googles servers. This is good news. The timing of the change is interesting though. Could it be sheer coincidence that Google has now made this change at the same time as it announced it would allow all Gmail users to log in to their accounts by default to use the secure method of encryption.”]
Source: https://grahamcluley.com/gmail-https-enabled-default/