Google has updated its Gmail service to warn users if their account has seen some suspicious activity, using a new geolocation function.

Hard not to wonder now just how common scams like these are...

Word of the new functionality comes via the official Gmail blog, which is fairly quick to point out the benefits of being able to see, quite literally, where the various different login attempts hitting your Gmail account are coming from. If you find that someone else has been logging in to your Gmail account from another location, Google will immediately offer you the option to change your password. If nothing else, there’s one fairly common scam that this should help to eliminate fairly quickly.

According to the posting to the Gmail blog from its Engineering Director, Pavni Diwanji,

“A few weeks ago, I got an email presumably from a friend stuck in London asking me for some money to help him out. It turned out that the email was sent me a scammer who had hijacked my friend’s account. By reading his email, the scammer had figured out my friend’s whereabouts and was emailing all of his contacts … Today we’re introducing a new feature to notify you when we detect suspicious login activity on your account.”

The notification itself is a solid red, hard to miss, and simply reads, “Warning: We believe your account was recently accessed from Poland.” Followed by two links, the first to show the users preferences that they might change their password if necessary, and the second to simple ignore the notification, useful in the case that a user was simply travelling to another country.

If nothing else, it’s a solid addition, and one that could well help avoid some fairly malicious activity.