Google’s email service Gmail offered for some time now an overview of the recent Gmail account activities which listed the access time, account connection type, IP address and country of the last Gmail logins.
Access to this feature is provided at the bottom of every Gmail page by clicking on the Details link there. But that option is a passive one as it requires the user to access it. Users who do not check the account activity there might miss unauthorized access to their Gmail account.
To improve that Google has implemented a new automatic option that warns the Gmail user whenever suspicious account activity was detected.
The message “Warning: We believe your account was recently accessed from: Country. Show details and preferences. Ignore” will be displayed if Gmail believes that it discovered unauthorized access to the Gmail account.
The warning message is for instance triggered if the account is accessed from multiple countries in short succession, for instance first i the United States and then two hours later from China. This could be unauthorized or legit use if the account is shared with another person.
A click on the Show details and preferences link will display pretty much the same information that are displayed when clicking on the Details link at the bottom of every Gmail page with the difference that it is also showing information about concurrent sessions.
The concurrent session information table lists all access types, locations and IP addresses that are currently accessing the Gmail account with an option to sign out of all other sessions immediately.
The recent activity table lists the date and time, access type, location and IP address of the last log ins to the account. An option to change the password immediately is provided if the activity contains logins that have not been done by the user.
The new warning is an important step in informing Gmail users of suspicious account behavior. Google will implement the feature into Google Apps as well. (via Gmail Blog)
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