>>>>>>s it possible that since I was VPNed to a server in Florida, Google "saw" my Outlook connections as if there were done from a different than my IP and from a different physical location?
>>>>
>>>>This does happen to me when I'm traveling around the place, though more usually with Facebook than Google. It does look suspicious if you access from the East Coast and then moments later from Florida, so it's not a bad check by the providers. Re email, IME it usually does end up going via the VPN. Some of us do that on purpose to send outgoing email via a closed relay company email server. Unless somebody was able to sniff your VPN traffic you're probably fine, though VPN doesn't cover you past the router/machine you VPN into at the other end so if your email traverses their insecure wireless network on its way out, somebody might be able to sniff that. Not trying to state the obvious- but check to make sure you have ssl turned on in Outlook for gmail. Then maybe VPN in and google "what's my ip" to confirm the outgoing IP address from the customer.
>>>
>>>You are smart! I just did what you suggested and the my IP when I am connected via VPN to the customer is exactly what Google reported to be the culprit. Next time I will close Outlook before doing any work on the customer network.
>>>Thank you!
>>
>>To expand on John's post - with Win7 at least, in a lot of cases, when you're connected to a VPN, your computer's default gateway, DNS servers etc. get changed to those of the remote network. All of your Internet traffic gets routed through the remote network, too. So, suddenly Google will see GMail requests coming from Florida when moments earlier they were from your primary address. That is regarded as suspicious.
>>
>>Next time you're going to connect to the VPN:
>>
>>- before doing so, fire up a CMD window and run [ipconfig /all], note your default gateway and DNS servers
>>- do it again after connecting to the VPN, you'll probably see they have changed
>>
>>There's a post at http://stevejenkins.com/blog/2010/01/using-the-local-default-gateway-with-a-windows-vpn-connection/ that explains this further, and offers a fix.
>
>Thank you for the explanation. I am impressed that Google "monitors" these changes. Actually I remember that the same happened a few months ago and I didn't even put 2 and 2 together (as far as VPN) and changed all my Google account passwords. Now, the simple solution is to close Outlook before connecting. But what I also noticed is that I connect to many other clients via VPN and it does not happen. So there must be something different about this customer VPN or something else.

What I posted applies to the default Windows VPN client. Maybe you're using that with the "problem" connection and some other VPN client software for connections that don't show that problem.

If it's the default Windows client that shows the problem you can turn off that problem behaviour using the link above, the section in turning off the "Use default gateway on remote network" setting.