On 7/24/08, Hank Nussbacher <hank@efes.iucc.ac.il> wrote:
On Thu, 24 Jul 2008, Jeffrey Ollie wrote:
Interestingly enough, Google just added a feature to GMail to force secure connections:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/07/force-gmail-to-use-secure-connectio...
Jeff
I wish Yahoo and Hotmail even had the ability of *reading* email via https: http://www.interall.co.il/hotmail-yahoo-https.html
I'm sure when Gmail gets close to the same number of users as Yahoo, they will discover how challenging and painful it is to support that many simultaneous short-lived SSL connections. It's much easier to support CPU intensive tasks like full-time SSL when you have a small user base; as that user base grows, the cost of providing that service continues to grow, often outpacing the revenue benefit it brings. I *definitely* agree that any paid-for mail service should support full-time SSL connectivity for reading as well as login. For a free service, though, it's hard to afford the CPU resources to handle it as the demand scales up.
And then MS doesn't quite understand why people prefer Gmail to Hotmail :-)
-Hank
The good news is that the more users switch to gmail from hotmail, the less load there is on the server CPUs at hotmail, and the sooner they'll be able to afford to enable full-time SSL for the remaining users. :D So clearly, the goal is to encourage everyone *else* to go use gmail, leaving you to enjoy the very lightly-loaded and highly-responsive platform left behind. ;) Matt