Life: Checking Outlook Recent Activity

I received an email for verification from Microsoft and was not sure what it was for. So I went onto my outlook accounts to check which one had the email address that received the verification request.

While I was at it, I checked the recent activity page. I noticed on one of my accounts a bunch of sign-in from Netherlands. I panicked a little, so I changed my password. I then checked one of my google accounts that automatically downloaded the emails and did find that the schedule matched up.

One odd part of this was that in the morning, the IP was from the US. The IP from last night was from Netherlands.

Google (US) - 209.85.214.140
Google (Netherland) - 209.85.219.14

Email

It would be nice if the email contained what address it was trying to verify.

Microsoft account

Verify your email address

To finish setting up this Microsoft account, we just need to make sure this email address is yours.

Steps to check activity

1. Sign into outlook.com
2. Click on your user icon
3. Account Settings
4. Recent activity
5. Answer security question

Buggish: Gmail down 1/24/2014

I needed to check on an email. To my surprise, I could not access Gmail. At first, I thought I lost internet connection because I lose that connection way more often than Gmail. After further investigation, I was able to access Google search, blogger, and other sites.

Searching to see if there were other posts or news on gmail, I eventually stumbled across Google's Apps Status Dashboard. There it reported that it was down at 2:12, although there were sites that it saw it was down at 2:06 while I found it around 2:10 although I noticed that gchat was down earlier.

Fortunately, I have backup email with Microsoft's hotmail and was able to get the information I needed. This a good reminder to keep multiple accounts with cloud services. I'm not sure how companies would justify having costs for two services though. It is surprising how much companies are not willing to pay extra for disaster recovery, so I find it unlikely companies would be willing to get a second email cloud service. They may consider bringing it back inhouse, but that would probably cost more than two cloud services.

Services are back up for me around 2:20-ish, although I did not check anytime between it was down and checking it again. Appears in the status dashboard has other services interrupted but I do not seem to be impacted by those.

Reference
http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status&ts=1390591289210
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/todays-outage-for-several-google.html