There were so many instances which kept on proving vulnarabilities of Gmail. Many people on Orkut lost their account including my cousin due to this vulnurablities. In most of the cases it’s hard to get back your account. My friend Parashuram, who is also an Open Social developer has created a widget/gadget which keeps looking at the activities on your Gmail account & notifies whenever something suspecious happens. To use this Gmail Burglar Alarm application, you should first enable labs feature “Add any gadget by URL” by going to “Settings–>Labs–>Add any gadget by URL”. After enabling it, goto “Gadgets” tab under Settings & add gadget from URL “http://gmailids.appspot.com/gids.xml“. You can view much detailed video demonstration on adding this application/gadget into your gmail account here.

The gadget sits in your gmail sidebar & keeps tracking login/logout time, browser, OS, IP …etc. The gadget creates two calendars inside your google account, one to keep track of all the activities on your account & the other to send notification SMS when something suspecious happens. Interesting fact about this gadget is, it uses Google calendar to send SMS! Since gadget makes use of your calendars to keep the data, all the data remains with you.

Limitations:

Though this is one of the steps you can take to avoid hackers getting into your account, this can’t be ultimate. This gadget has few limitations. Gmail Burglar Alarm tracks logins only from web browsers. Can’t track logins from other applications like Gmail Mobile client, Mail Clients like thunderbird or from mobile browser.

Disclaimer:

Be careful while adding these kind of gadgets into your gmail account. Add them only from trusted sources. Gmail Burglar Alarm gadget is made with good intentions in mind. But similar gadget can also be made to steal your account password!

Headover to Parashuram’s blog to know more & install this security gadget.