Gmail – Does email from one Gmail account to another ever leave the Gmail system

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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?

Best Answer

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]:

  1. Log in to Gmail
  2. Open the message you'd like to view headers for.
  3. Click the down arrow next to Reply, at the top of the message pane.
  4. Select Show Original.

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