*Update 17/2/2010*: GMail recently enabled this HTTPs connection by default, so please read on for the fix!
You’ve probably just enabled the latest setting in Gmail: Always use HTTPs. (But good news, there’s a fix!)
Though this setting is advised (as it is more secure, and less vulnerable to Cross Site Scripting or XSS), it has the downside of disabling your GMail notifier. It will spill out “An error has occured. Cannot connect to your mailbox. Service temporarily unavailable.”- alerts instead of notifying you of new messages.
Yet I can’t image it would take long for Google to prepare a fix for this.
More information on the “Always use https” can be found in the GMail blog.
*Update*: They’ve added a quick fix for this issue, where a registry setting is altered so the Notifier retrieves your e-mail from the HTTPs site, instead of the HTTP site. More information, see the comments!
Was having this problem and stumbled upon this patch that fixes the issue. Notifier is now working perfectly with https enabled.
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=9429
Awesome, that works ! :-)
It just changes a registry setting, where it used to refer to http://, it now retrieves mail from the https:// version.
Here’s the record that is changed:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Gmail\Flags]
“url”=”https://mail.google.com/mail/”
Thanks a lot for this https mention I found this site googling the error message. Didn’t put the https setting at the time of this error occuring.
I don’t get why they haven’t updated gmail notifier or put the patch on the gmail notifier page.
thank you very much, i found your blog googling for a Notifier fix. now all works fine.
Pingback: GMail notifier (windows) fix « firmit - a nomad in the Debian world
Pingback: Gmail Notifier « Tardis for a Toolbox
Worked. Thanks!
thanks from Turkiye
Thank you!!! I could not figure out for the life of me what was going on. I appreciate the link. :)
thanks for this, changed the registry value myself, crazy that this is still a problem over a year later!
@Matti
When I click on “notifier_https” all my computer does is bring up
“[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Gmail\Flags]
“url”=”https://mail.google.com/mail/” on the notepad. So what’s the next step to install this patch??
@Matt; try to find some info on “regedit” (start > run > regedit), find the key, and change the website URL to the new HTTPs version.
Thanks for the reg. fix.
The key didn’t exist for me, but adding a string value did the trick.
This worked for me, I had to add the key though.
It looks like with google’s recent change to require https after the china issues it broke gmail notifier which seems to have been using http?
Google wheres a patch for this???
Don’t forget to modify path on 64 bit Windows:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wow6432Node\Google\Gmail\Flags]
“url”=”https://mail.google.com/mail/”