If you are now having problem sending and receiving emails from/to China, you are not alone.

China is an isolated island when email is concerned at this moment. Apparently someone “up there” behind the routers/switches is tweaking something and GFW has gone wild.

We have customers in China reporting that they have been facing difficulties accessing emails hosted on our servers from yesterday. No issue found on our servers. No client from other countries is having any problem.

We thought, well, this is just another temporary connection issue in China, caused by GFW as usual. Then I found stunning news from most of the major hosting providers in China and realized it’s totally screwed up, big time.

Here’s announcement from the biggest host in China, xinnet.com:

Translation:

Drea Email Users,

We have detected unknown technical problems with international gateway which may cause these problems:

xinnet email users receive bounced back error emails while sending emails to overseas domains, bounced back email could indicate:

1)Connected to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx but connection died. (#4.4.2)
I’m not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.

2)xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 551 User not local; please try <forward-path>
Giving up on xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

We’re actively reporting the issue to related Internet organizations and authorities, and will inform you once it’s solved.

We aplogize for inconvenience caused, thank you for understanding.

Now, annoucement from 2nd largest host of China, net.cn:

This one is more entertaining:

Dear net.cn Email Users,

Starting from July 16th, we have received reports from corporate mail users that large amount of emails sent to overseas are bounced back, with error messages:

1）I’m not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.

2）<xxx@xxx.com>: 551 User not local; please try <forward-path>

After caredul investigation, we found this in our logfile:

Connected to remote host, but connection died. (#4.4.2)

which means, the remote server disconnected without giving a reason.

Currently we are not able to know the exact reason, but we suspect that emails are blocked by unknown technism on top of SMTP protocol, because many hosting providers are having the same problem. Together with other providers, we have reported the issue to related Internet organizations and authorities, and will inform you once it’s solved. Thank you for you patience.

The most entertaining announcement is from 35.com:

I translate part of it here:

3)While sending email to overseas, the other party receives text “aaazzzaaazzz” only in email content. —– isn’t it funny? 🙂 no, this is not in their announcement.

5)When someone overseas sends you email, you receive text “aaazzzaaazzz” only in email content. —– hey, at least it’s fair huh?

6)When you send email to overseas or someone overseas sends you email, the email received is blank.

So at 35.com, we suggest that you write email in simplified Chinese and simplify your email content, put body content in Word or PDF format, zip it using winrar and send it as attachment.

Ouch! Let’s shoot some videos and upload to youtube, you can communicate that way as well…

More announcements:

163：http://vip.163.com/vip/notice.html

sina：http://mail.sina.net/notice/050701.html

TOM：http://vip.tom.com/popup/070717.html

21CN：http://mail.21cn.com/banner/popunder_20070717_corp.html

263： http://gmail.263.net/news1-0.html