Recently, My gmail account was hacked by some botnet which sent out e-mails to all my contact asking them to check out a website. I only realized this when I checked my gmail "Sent Mail" folder and had to immediately send a warning message to all my contacts telling them that my account was hacked and not to click on any links from my previous mails.

I changed the password which solved the issue, but who knows, some other botnet might just be able to bruteforce My password and get me in trouble again.

I always used to wonder if there was any e-mail provider who could keep a log of our previous login timestamp details just so that we know there ain't anything suspicious happening with our account and voilà! Gmail now has the answer.

Gmail  recently introduced a new feature to notify users when they detect suspicious login activity on their account.

A warning message saying, "Warning: We believe your account was last accessed from…" along with the geographic region is posted in your inbox just the way its shown in the snapshot below.



Gmail's automated system matches the relevant IP address, logged per the Gmail privacy policy, to a broad geographical location in order to determine when to display this message. For eg, a login appearing to come from India and occurring a few hours after a login from United States may trigger an alert.

By clicking on the "Details" link next to the message, users will be able to see the last account activity window that they're used to, along with the most recent access points.


I find this to be a pretty neat feature and gives Gmail users a sense of security which would help them to stay alert.

All this information was displayed on Google's Official Gmail Blog