Access to Gmail in China partially restored

The four-day shutdown of the Gmail service in Mainland China began to mysteriously and no less mysteriously ended. FT.com and the Wall Street Journal report that blocking of the Great Wall of China firewall service has been partially discontinued.

This year, on the 25th anniversary of the events of June 4, access to all Google sites in China was lost.

Usually, Google services in China are used by people traveling abroad or working for foreign companies. As a rule, these are people with good income. For example, one of the bloggers at Weibo complained that he had missed the opportunity to enroll in the Wharton School of Business in the US - an email was not received on time.

Shortly after the June blocking, users noticed that there was still an opportunity to get access to the boxes using the IMAP, SMTP and POP3 protocols. Through these methods, email clients work, such as Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail.
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Gmail remained one of the most recent encryption communication methods available, which did not comply with the personal data laws of China. This provision provides for the authorities to access any user information. A few days ago, the loophole of mail clients stopped working.

Google has not yet given any comments, it was only said that the problem is not on the side of Gmail. There were no statements on this issue from the Chinese authorities either. All that is - the words of the official, who say that she does not know anything about blocking.

The elimination of this Gmail access channel has caused a slight discontent even among the upper levels of the Communist Party. Today on the site of the state newspaper Global Times appeared an editorial on this issue.

If you look at the statistics on Gmail traffic in China , you will notice some manifestation of activity. It is still difficult to say whether access has been restored throughout the country or not.

The Great Chinese Firewall is well-known to any Internet user in the PRC. Many websites are blocked, and access to the external network is limited by the speed of traffic exchange. Therefore, the largest in population country in the world has a highly developed domestic market for analogues of Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other sites that cannot be accessed without VPN. Users are not particularly uncomfortable, as Baidu, Renren, Weibo and Youku Tudou perfectly replace the blocked originals.

FT.com gives a forecast that the complete blocking of IMAP, SMTP and POP3 of the Gmail service was not the last. We should expect a recurrence of this situation in the future.

Photo of Google office in Beijing, March 23, 2010, by Andy Wong / Associated Press.