Sign out from Gmail remotely
If you have used a public computer to surf the net and check your emails before, you might probably have forgotten to sign out of your email account before you left the computer for another stranger to use. That stranger can access your emails, change your settings, send emails from your account and even obtain sensitive information of you or your contacts. Just as easy as how I accessed someone’s email.
So, how can you make sure your Gmail accounts are secure and not accessed by others while you’re at home?
Checkout the screenshot above. Gmail has a section at the bottom to show your account activity. Let’s say if you have not touched your Gmail for more then 8 hours but the information shows that it has been accessed just 3 hours ago, then you know that someone has just accessed your emails! Either that, or you need some vitamins to boosts your memory.
What can you do about it? You certainly do not want to drive all the way back to the Internet cafe to whack the person using your account and just to sign off from there. You certainly also wouldn’t want to wait until that computer’s log-in session is over (Waiting for it to log out itself). You are most certainly unable to do it in time before that stranger is able to compose a new email titled “all your email are belong to us”.
All you have to do is to click on the details link and be presented with this screen.
Then, click on the “Sign out all other sessions” button to make the computer you’re currently using the only one signed in. Which means, you’ll be sure you’re the only one with access to your own emails!
Google will remind you that anyone with your password can still sign into your account and will ask if you want to change your password. It’s a good practice to have a complex but easy to remember password. That makes it harder for some software to decrypt your password or for others to guess your password just by viewing at your keyboard while you’re typing.
Try a combination of alphabets and numbers including at least a symbol and make use of the shift or caps lock.
The safer way to surf using a public computer is still to always clean all the browser’s cache and cookies after using it. Or the safest way is not to use a public computer at all as you might not know if there’s a keylogger (which can record all your computer actions) infecting that computer.