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Gmail Warns Users Of Suspicious Account Activity

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 18:00:11 +0000

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)

Process NZBs And Torrents In Gmail Automatically

Martin Brinkmann — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:56:05 +0000

You might stumble upon a torrent or nzb file that you want to download without the ability to do so right away because you are not at your computer system. Maybe you are at work or school. Most users email the website link or the torrent to one of their email accounts and check their email accounts when they are at their computer system to start the download.

MailBin 2 has been designed to provide users with a valid alternative. The application will basically monitor a specified Gmail account for emails with a specific phrase attached to them. These email messages are then scanned for nzb, torrent and zipped attachments which are then extracted and saved to a local directory.

The safest way of using the program would be to create a new Gmail account and use it exclusive for these files. The user needs to enable POP3 access in the Gmail account and instruct Gmail to delete messages after they have been received via POP3. The Gmail account information and a unique passphrase have to be entered into the Mailbin application. Mailbin will then process all incoming messages in the form email+passphrase@gmail.com and ignore the rest.

The files are then copied into specified directories on the local computer system from where they can be processed automatically by an appropriate software program. Other features include:

Support for an unlimited number of account and passphrase combinations
Account login information encryption
Ability to download NZB and .Torrent files along with Zip archives
User-defined email download interval and number of messages to scan
Simple, easy to use interface with a small footprint
Ability to pause email retrieval
Minimizable to system tray

The main benefit of using Mailbin 2 is that the NZB and Torrent files do get processed immediately on a computer system which could mean that the downloads can be started right away. Mailbin 2 is a portable software program for the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Gmail Account Manager

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 07 May 2009 10:25:01 +0000

Google’s email service Gmail is highly popular. One of the restrictions that many users face is that it only allows to sign into one account at a time in the web interface. That’s problematic if a user operates multiple accounts and needs to check them regularly. This is for example the case in companies that use more than one gmail email account. It is possible to use a desktop email client to retrieve all Gmail account messages at once. We recently reviewed a Greasemonkey script that would allow a user to manage multiple Gmail accounts (read: Gmail Login).

The Firefox add-on Gmail Manager is another possibility. It is a highly popular add-on that allows a user to manage multiple Gmail accounts at once. It places an icon in the Firefox status bar that provides quick access to all registered Gmail accounts. Options provided are information about the unread emails count of each Gmail account and the possibility to write emails using a specific account. Notifications can be configured to inform the user if new unread emails are available in one of the accounts and tooltips are available for additional information and mail previews.

Gmail Manager supports Gmail hosted accounts and provides one click access to any Gmail account that has been added to the Firefox add-on.

The Firefox extension is an excellent companion for Firefox users who operate multiple Gmail accounts.