Recently, while checking my mails in Gmail, an extra piece of information regarding "Recent Activity" towards the end of the page caught my attention. If you haven't noticed, check near the bottom of your Gmail page. Gmail now displays your last account activity stats.
It displays the time elapsed since the last activity that took place on your account along with the IP address that was used to log in. Initially when I saw it, it was showing me the time since I logged in. Besides the time is a link to give you more details, clicking on which lists out the last few session details in a new popout window. The page displays information about the last activity on your mail account and any concurrent activity in detail.
The 'Details' page shows the access type (Browser, Mobile or POP3, etc.), the IP address and the date & time of the current and the last 4 sessions. Apart from this, if the account is opened in an another location, you are informed about it in the Concurrent Session Information section. This section lists out the number of places where the account has been simultaneously logged into, along with the access type(s) and the IP address(es).
To take it for a spin, I decided to log in to my account from my mobile browser too. The same section on the mobile browser showed me that the account is open in one other location along with the IP address (of my computer) and an option to check the details. Soon, the content on desktop browser too changed and showed that the account is open in one other location along with the IP address of my mobile phone.
Apart from this, the 'Details' pop-out page gives you an option to sign out all other sessions. The Gmail Help Center, in this answer, says that this data can be used to find out if and when someone gained access to your account. It says, you can know that your account was compromised if there is a great variation in the IP addresses in spite of you accessing it from the same computer every time, or if there is an access type that you never used, or that there is a concurrent session that you do not know of. Here is an entry in the Official Gmail Blog regarding the same.
In my opinion, this is a nice move by Google to keep its users informed about the security of their accounts. With this information at hand, one might be able to minimize damages in an unfortunate event of his/her account security getting compromised.
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2 comments:
Very nice feature... but it doesn't work with IE6 (and maybe with other browsers).
You can use the direct url of the page!
Follow these steps:
1) change your browser's user agent string (you can use something like "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)"), close the browser and reopen it in order the change to take effect. From now your browser will be identified as IE7
2) Log in to Gmail with your account, et voilà, "Last account activity" is available on the bottom of the page. You click it and the popup opens. Save the url of this page, which will work on all browsers, then undo the changes you made to the user agent string of IE6 and restart the browser.
When you are logged onto Gmail and you need the "Last account activity" page, simply use the url you previously saved.
@Anonymous:
IE6 seems to be the only incompatible browser, at least amongst the common ones.
What you mentioned is a very nice tweak. Should be really helpful for those with incompatible browsers.
In fact even I didn't notice that even the URL can be used. So, thanks for the info :)
Keep writing in..
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