China’s Internet censorship authorities seem to have waited until the day after Christmas to block all remaining access to Gmail—the popular Google email service—to Internet users in China.
For years, the Gmail website has been blocked. Users accepted this as a fact of life, and got around it by using email clients, like iOS Mail, Thunderbird, and Outlook.
Those programs access Google’s servers without going through the website, using protocols like IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) and POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3).
Now, all those other channels are blocked.
The only way to view Gmail in China now is through a virtual private network, or VPN—a paid service that securely routes the connection to a server outside China, and accesses the Internet from there.
Expatriate internet users in China are not happy—a good portion of the reaction to this recent move, on websites like Reddit and Twitter, is unprintable.
