Date format used in US is probably the most unintuitive.
At first I read that as 12 march 2010. Made me think for a moment that it took Google almost a year to fix it.
The US date format isn't unintuitive if you're fluent in colloquial American english, because that's how we speak dates aloud. You're more likely to hear "March 12, 2010" than "12 March, 2010" in casual conversation.
That said, I try to stick to 12 Mar 2010 (abbreviated textual month) on the intertubes in deference to the fact that the rest of the world formats dates differently, and I find that to be a nice unambiguous middle-ground.
As far as I know, Gmail always uses SSL for everything. Even the SMTP submission is forced-ssl. So it should be safe to use on unsecured networks, but you can easily verify this with Wireshark or tcpdump.
Mmm you should have a different notion of easy, as it would need a network packet sniffer running in your mobile, testing it with an android emulator in your computer or being able to run software in your AP.
Date format used in US is probably the most unintuitive. At first I read that as 12 march 2010. Made me think for a moment that it took Google almost a year to fix it.