The Gmail gadget does not support the “Always use https” preference.  Does this annoy you?

I started getting that awhile back when on my iGoogle personalized home page and it looks like Google is not going to fix it.  Boo.

So what is a person to do?  I want the conveince of iGoogle, but I want the security of HTTPS when sending and reading email.  Enter Greasemonkey on Firefox!

If you install the Greasemonkey Firefox Extension.  You have lots of neat scripts available to you.  Here is a list of 25 Useful Ones.

The one that is big for me is: Google Secure Pro.  This script forces Gmail, Google Docs, and other Google services to use Secure HTTP rather than the normal un-secure.

Once you get those two items in place you are golden!  You iGoogle will now display you top five messages and when you head to Gmail it will switch you to the secure mode.  Don’t forget to switch off “Always use https” as a Gmail setting.

The only drawback to this approach is that you have to install both of these items on every machine you check Gmail for and this is a Firefox only solution.

If you think that is a pretty good setup for Gmail, take a look at Better Gmail 2 as well.  Lots of neat stuff in that extension as well.