The iPhone's SSL Certificate Verification Error

During sync setup the iPhone/iPod Touch attempts to "auto-configure". The auto-configuration process tries to fetch the server name by querying (using http with ssl) a configuration server that in turn is identified from the user's email address. Auto-configuration is designed to be optional in that if no configuration is found, the user is prompted to enter the server name manually. The SSL certificate validation error shown below occurs for GMail users as an unintended side effect of this auto-configuration process. Because the user's email address is of the form @gmail.com, the phone attempts to fetch its configuration data from https://gmail.com. Google has configured the servers at that URL with an SSL certificate for the host "google.com" and therefore the request triggers a certification validation error. Try it with your browser (click the URL above). Because the attempted auto-configuration query produces no useful results, the certificate validation error can be safely ignored.