I ask because I connect to Gmail over HTTPS and if emails sent from one account to another (or the same account, just to back something up) don't actually leave Google then it's end-to-end email encryption.
Is this the case?
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Sign up to join this communityI ask because I connect to Gmail over HTTPS and if emails sent from one account to another (or the same account, just to back something up) don't actually leave Google then it's end-to-end email encryption.
Is this the case?
It depends on the network setup Google has. You can check the route your email took by checking the message headers. In GMail, you can do this by[1]:
Look for the Received
headers. Those identify the email servers that handled the email.
However, to completely ensure that you have end-to-end privacy, you should encrypt you email using PGP or GNUPG.
Source: [1] https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=22454
...don't actually leave Google then it's end-to-end email encryption.
End-to-end encryption means that the message is encrypted from the time it leaves the sender until it arrives at the recipient. Even if the email does not leave Google's 'network' it is not encrypted while it is stored, just while it is transferred from sender to server and server to receiver. As Ninthin wrote, if you want to end-to-end encryption, you should use an encryption package. GPG, PGP, TrulyMail, or another. There are many (and some are free) but you need to get counterparty agreement on the software to use.