Today I got a call from someone whom I helped setup with Google Apps for domains. Primarily, he’s using Google to handle his email – it’s pretty much the exact same system that powers GMail, but under your own domain name. We use it too for perceptus.ca email. It’s awesome. You can use the excellent webmail interface, and IMAP for full desktop and mobile email applications. Plus, it’s free if you don’t need very many user logins.
If you have a vanity domain for yourself, get Google to host your email. You won’t find anything better, especially for $0.
Anyway, my client is in China, behind the world’s biggest firewall. And he can’t access his email. His web requests get forwarded to weird places. Ironically, he sounded rather pleased, since he’s actually on vacation, but it did raise some good questions.
Does Google Apps for Domains email actually work in China? I don’t know, it might be a weird forwarding bug. I’m not there now, so I can’t experiment with it. If someone reads this and can confirm success or failure with Google Apps for Domains, that would be excellent. Unfortunately, this is some info that I can’t seem to find on the Internet.
As an aside, in trying to figure this out, I stumbled on Google’s Transparency Report. It’s a fun way to see if Google services are blocked in different countries at any given time.
I wonder if any of Perceptus’ websites are blocked in China?
Tags: china, email, firewall, free, google apps for domains, imap, transparency
November 9th, 2010 at 10:42 am
I use googleapps for several domains from registered via godaddy. The issue that I have seen is that I was unable to visit http://mail.domain1.com it would not pull up the page, however another domain, http://mail.domain2.com did work.
When I attempt to go to the site via : http://mail.domain1.com it doesn’t work (can’t remember the issue exactly), however when i tried : https://www.google.com/a/domain1.com it does work.
The other thing to try now, is that google has allow any googleapp account to be accessed via gmail. There is a new setting (just launch in october) in the domain manager to allow googleapps to behave more like a standard gmail account and have access to more of the google account services. In that case the user can just visit http://www.gmail.com
All that being said, I’ve had no problems using my iphone and outlook client via imap to access my googleapps email from Shanghaii and Hong Kong China.
November 9th, 2010 at 10:51 am
Thanks Michael. That sort of confirms what I think happens. The big firewall is not following the forwarding that Google does when you visit http://mail.yourdomain.com. I should check one day if it’s a META REFRESH or Javascript forward.
I’ll have to give my clients the https://www.google.com/a/domain1.com format URL next time.