Access to Gmail in China partially restored

The four-day shutdown of the Gmail service in mainland China mysteriously began and no less mysteriously ended. FT.com and the Wall Street Journal have reported that the blocking of the Great Wall Fire Wall mail service has been partially discontinued.

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

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

Shortly after the June blocking, users noticed that there was still the opportunity to access the mailboxes via IMAP, SMTP and POP3 protocols. Using these methods, email clients, such as Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail, work.

Gmail remained one of the latest encryption communication methods available that did not comply with China's personal data laws. These rules provide for the ability of authorities to access any user information. A few days ago, a loophole of email clients also stopped working.

Google has not yet made any comments, it was only said that the problem is not on the side of Gmail. There were no statements on this subject from the Chinese authorities. All that is is wordsan official who says that she knows nothing about the blockage.

The liquidation of this channel of access to Gmail caused slight discontent even among the top Communist Party. Today on the website of the state newspaper Global Times an editorial appeared on this subject.

If you look at the statistics of Gmail traffic in China , you can see some manifestation of activity. It is still difficult to say whether access was restored throughout the country or not.

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

FT.com predicts that the complete blocking of Gmail’s IMAP, SMTP and POP3 services was not the last. This situation should be expected to recur in the future.

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