Detecting suspicious account activity: not an email from your Bank!

Gmail does (in my opinion) a fairly good job of filtering spam. Almost without fail all emails suggesting that my Bank account at Nat West (which I don’t have) to bzgn(who doesn’t exist) @(the company web domain) go straight into the spam box. They know that I am not interested in Vicodin (would we know of this drug if not for House?) or any form of little blue pills of uncertain provenance (or indeed of certain provenance thank you!). So they go too. Its one of the reasons for using Gmail as our company email interface.

The latest tweak to the Google system is to analyse where email account is being used from. The idea is that if your account has been compromised, it will be logged on to from an “unusual” internet location. At first sight you might say a location you do not use. It is also (probably) a location where other anomalous activity is occurring. Let’s face it, bad guys stealing account details don’t just stop at one person’s account.
A bit like using your credit card, the Bank knows where you are the moment you put in your card and pin number. Now this information is used regularly by (at least) the police as we know from CSI and other stories. So hands up who spots this latest twist on email account usage in a CSI episode?

To read the official line:
Official Gmail Blog: Detecting suspicious account activity