With wine-1.3.14 (well, really, wine from git), I was able to do rm -rf ~/.wine winetricks-alpha -q ie7 wine 'C:\Program Files\\Internet Explorer\\iexplore' https://mail.google.com and connect successfully. However, wine 'C:\Program Files\\Internet Explorer\\iexplore' https://gmail.com fails as you describe. Which wine are you using, how did you install ie7, and which sites are you trying to connect to?
