CES 2014: Yahoo! turns on HTTPS encryption for Mail by default

As promised last year, Yahoo! has managed to turn on HTTPS by default for all Yahoo! Mail exchanges. The encryption also found a mention in CEO Marissa Mayer’s CES keynote speech at Las Vegas.

Now when you send or receive mails on Yahoo! Mail, your exchanges will automatically be encrypted by default and protected with 2,048 bit certificates. Jeff Bonforte, Senior VP of Communication Products at Yahoo! announced the feature with a blog post today.

Encrypted

He went on to mention that anytime you use Yahoo’s Mail services, whether it is on the web, mobile web, mobile apps or even via IMAP, POP or SMTP, it will remain completely encrypted. This encryption will not just remain limited to your mails but also extend itself to your attachments, contacts, calendar and the Messenger in the Mail.

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“Security is a key focus for us and we’ll continue to enhance our security technology and policies so we can provide a safe and secure experience for our users,” he wrote. In November last year, Yahoo! had announced its intentions to protect user privacy on its services, especially against the snooping activities carried out by the NSA.

“We’ve worked hard over the years to earn our users’ trust and we fight hard to preserve it,” wrote Marissa Mayer in an earlier blog post. She said that while over the previous six months reports of the US government secretly accessing user data without the knowledge of tech companies had been cropping up, Yahoo! reiterated that it had never taken part in it. Neither the NSA nor any other government agency was given access to Yahoo’s data centres ever, she had asserted.

Now only if the Mail client itself could be fixed for a better performance.