Checking your Gmail Access History

Have you ever wondered if someone is looking your Gmail? Users configured their Gmail seurity for 2-Step Verification don’t need to worry about this. If you've neglected to use strong passwords in the past, or you leave your computer running unattended, it’s not a bad habit for you to peek in here every time you access your Gmail.

Click on Details and you will see the following screen:

We’ve blurred our “IP Address”, so we don’t get attacked, but you will see four numbers something like 70.7.100.50. These numbers represent the network card in your computer or your router’s network card. Most people get a new “IP Address” every time they login, so you may see several different numbers. If you live in the United States and you see another country, like our above example shows Romania, you may need to worry.

We purposely tunneled through another country to make this a good screen capture, but you should only see your country listed. If you see suspicious entries, look up the IP address to see if it’s from your Internet Service Provider (ISP).

A good site for this is http://www.ip-adress.com/ip_tracer/. This site allows three anonymous queries per day.

Just copy and paste the IP address in question the click the little “>” symbol and information will display.

The “ISP of this IP” should be your ISP. Remember that you could also be logging in from work or a mobile device, which will display different information. Also, the easiest way to see what IP Address you have is by looking at the top right corner of ip-address.com. It will show My IP is: xx.xx.xx.xx. This will be the IP you presently have.

If you’ve setup Google 2-step authentication, you can sleep better without having to look at this often. Before you start sleeping better, you should check your forwarding settings in Gmail. For more information on forwarding see How to Check your GMail Forwarding