Last week we wrote of an important step that you should take to secure your Gmail account – associating a cell phone number with your Gmail account, so that you can receive a recovery code via text message.  As we pointed out, that’s not foolproof – a savvy hacker could change the cell phone number associated with your account.  Then what?  Google does offer an account recovery process, but it requires you to know the answer to several questions.

The answers to these questions are not simple to locate.  The questions can be found on Google’s page for recovering a compromised account (you’ll need to select the “no” radio button to see the questions).  You should consider locating and recording these answers now, as they’ll be hard or impossible to obtain if you don’t have access to your account. These are the questions:

• Do you use Gmail with this account? (required field)
• Do you use orkut with this Google account?
• Do you use Blogger with this Google Account?
• Account creation date (month and year) (required field)
• Last successful login date (month, day, and year)
• Last password that you remember (required field)

You also will be asked to identify four Google products that you use with your account (such as Docs, Reader, etc.), and the date that you started using each one.  You can find a list of your accounts on the Google accounts page.  Figuring out these dates is perhaps the trickiest part of the process.  Here are a few tips for finding some of these dates:

• Search your Gmail messages with this phrase: congratulations google team.  Many of the Google services use those words in the welcome message that you receive when signing up, so searching for those words will return those welcome messages (and the date on which they were received).  Searching for just “Google” and “team” may help, too.  My Wave invitation had those words in it.

• You can try to find the origination date of your Google Docs account by looking for the date of your oldest documents.  Of course, if you delete old documents, then the date of your oldest current document won’t be much help.

• Do you have an Android phone?  If so, find your receipt so that you can pinpoint when you started with Android.

• If you use Analytics on a web site, a review of your Analytics stats should give you a good idea of your account start date, simply by looking for the first date on which visits to your site were recorded.

• If you have a Blogger account, you could check for the date of your first post.  Your blogger profile also has an “On Blogger Since” date, but that just lists a month.

• If you have a Picasa account, you could check the upload date of your first photo.  This isn’t foolproof, if you’ve deleted photos or didn’t start uploading photos right away.

• Finally, you could also pick a service that you don’t use, and start using it today.  Then, should your account ever get compromised, you’ll know the start date of that service.

If you write these dates down now, you may thank yourself later if your account is ever hacked.  If you know of other methods for determining the date on which you started using a Google service, let us know in the comments.