Gmail now partially accessible in China, but it’s still seriously screwed up

Five days after Gmail became fully blocked in China as access to it via IMAP and POP stopped working, some people in mainland China are finding that it is now partially accessible.

However, as is often the case with China’s Great Firewall (which is the likely cause of this disruption, some six months after virtually every Google service was blocked in the country), it’s hard to verify what’s going on. But it seems safe to say that Gmail access via third-party apps like Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail is not back to normal in in China.

Google’s own real-time Transparency Report tool shows that Gmail traffic in China is still way down on normal levels (pre-December 26), but that a few more people are finding that it works on December 30 and today:

A ping test of Gmail’s IMAP and SMTP servers for sending and receiving emails via other email apps reveal that approximately 30 to 50 percent of pings reach servers, but the rest are blocked within mainland China. See example screenshots here and here.

Anecdotally, I’m finding that it takes anywhere from five to 20 minutes to send a test email to myself from my phone (with the VPN off) to my laptop (with the VPN on). This is one example from today when a mail sent at 10:20am from my phone arrived a full 14 minutes later:

Google has not found any issues with its servers, said the Guardian on Monday, and Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on the same day she was not aware of the blocking of Gmail access via IMAP or POP.

See: 10 of our favorite crowdfunding projects to come out of China this year