Gmail launched a new feature this morning designed to detect suspicious activity in your account and notify you when a suspicious login has occurred in your account.

Now, if it looks like something unusual is going on with your account, we’ll alert you by posting a warning message saying, “Warning: We believe your account was last accessed from…” along with the geographic region that we can best associate with the access.

To determine when to display this message, our automated system matches the relevant IP address, logged per the Gmail privacy policy, to a broad geographical location. While we don’t have the capability to determine the specific location from which an account is accessed, a login appearing to come from one country and occurring a few hours after a login from another country may trigger an alert.

If you see the warning and click to Show details and preferences, you’ll see something like the image below:

…which prompts you to change your password immediately if something seems amiss. If it’s a legitimate access—say you’re traveling—you can simply click click Dismiss and everything will go back to normal.

Gmail uses a common timing algorithm to fetch messages from POP accounts, one you can somewhat game, but sometimes you want to get at a message you knowhas arrived. A new Labs feature adds a manual refresh button for POP grabbing.

Head to your Labs settings and enable the “Refresh POP accounts” lab, then hit “Save changes” at the bottom or top of the page. From then on, you’ll see a “Refresh” link to the right of your inbox buttons. Hit it and Gmail will poll any email accounts you’ve set it up to fetch from. Want to get started importing your other mail accounts into Gmail?