Last signed in date for Google Apps is not correct

Question

I recently confronted a user for not using his Google Apps account - the admin console indicated he had not signed in for about a month. However the user had been signing in and using his account during that time. Several people were receiving emails which he intended to send, so he proved he was using his account during this time.

I administer an organization's Google Apps account for a domain. The admin console showing the list of users in the organization has a column for Last signed in. The Last signed in column contains dates for users which signed in more than 24 hours ago and times for users who have signed in less than 24 hours ago, as documented here.

Why did this user's Last signed in value give a date of one month ago for the last sign in, even though he had clearly been using the account more recently than one month ago? It wasn't even close. The value said one month ago, but there are genuine emails from his account spaced out over the entire time, and the user says he was signing in.

Does the Last signed in column only become updated when an actual login occurs? I was expecting a cookie-based access to the Google Account to update this value, but perhaps cookie-based verification using the web does not update this column.

Answer 1

There are various possibilities here:

1. As you have guessed, he keeps himself logged-in all the time, so the actual log in process does not occurs.

2. He is keeping himself logged in with a mobile device, never logging out, and the acutual log-in process does not occurs.

3. He does not uses the e-mail account given by the organisation but instead, http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=22370

4. He has some kind of Anti-Malware, Anti-Virus suite or something of that sort, which is interfering in the "Last Signed in" record keeping.

Answer 2

Also he can send mail using google apps API without login.

Answer 3

If you’re a G Suite developer with API access you can fix this issue. G Suite only register date and time when you use web login by going to mail.google.com. It will also register date and time on first run of outlook but not all users close their outlook on computers, like myself. My outlook has been running continuously on my computer for last 6 months. G Suite shows my last signed in date is 6 month ago. What G Suite need is to capture date and time form last email sent. Google has this information saved in DB. If you run a report on any user account in G Suite you’ll find last email sent by this user with date and time stamp. This is the information google should be using to update their ‘last signed in’ column. If you’re a developer, you can write your own code to fetch this date and time info from last email sent data and show it to your own ‘Last Signed in’ column. This information is more accurate.