Find Unauthorized Activity on Your Email Account

Do you suspect that your email account is under attack? Do you want to maintain the security of your email account and make it 100 percent hack proof? Well, Some times our email account might have got hacked and we may not be aware of that. We may believe that our email account is safe, but in reality our private and confidential information may be falling into the hands of a third person.

In this post, I will you will find information on how to find unauthorized activity on your account if any and how to stop them.

Signs of  Unauthorized Activity on an Email Account:

1. Your new emails are marked as Read even if you’ve not read them.
2. Your emails are moved to Trash or even permanently deleted without your notice.
3. Your emails are being forwarded to a third party email address (check your settings-> forwarding).
4. Your secondary email address or mobile number is changed.

If you come across any of the above activities on your email account, then it is a clear indication that your email account is hacked.

Additional Security Features in Gmail:

Gmail provides an additional security feature to protect your email account through the means of IP address logging. That is, Gmail records your IP address every time you log in to your Gmail account. So, if a third party gets access to your account then even his/her IP is also recorded. To see a list of recorded IP address, scroll down to the bottom of your Gmail account and you’ll see something like this.

You can see from the above figure that Gmail shows the IP address of last login (last account activity). You can click on Details to see the IP address of your last 5 activities. If you find that the IP listed in the logs doesn’t belong to you, then there are chances of unauthorized activity.

Steps to Stop the Unauthorized Activity:

If you feel/suspect that your account is hacked, then you must immediately take the actions mentioned below:

1. Change your Password
2. Change your security question.
3. Remove any third party email address (if any) to which your account is set to forward emails.
4. Make sure that you can access the email account of your secondary email address.
5. Also change your secondary email password and security question.

This ensures that your account is safe from future attacks. But I strongly recommend that you read my other post on How to protect your email account? I hope you liked this post. Please pass your comments.