Foreigner-friendly email service providers in China?

[Guest]

I've been having trouble lately using my email here without a VPN. It's not blocked, but it's very slow to access and sending an email to someone from it takes real effort. It's getting to a point where it's becoming impractical to carry on using Yahoo.

 

As a result, I'm thinking of a change, but I'm not sure where to! Does anyone have any recommendations of (preferably western) email providers to use in China? What have your experiences of email addresses in China been like? I'd rather avoid a Chinese @numbernumber email address if possible.

 

Thanks in advance!

[Angelina]

What have your experiences of email addresses in China been like?

 

 

Institutional email. 

 

 

 

Does anyone have any recommendations of (preferably western) email providers to use in China?

 

 

 

You can ask Chinese people too. 

[coolnicholas]

QQ mail

[abcdefg]

Get a VPN.

[dtcamero]

ya I second getting a QQ mail address. that will prob be fastest.

as a half-step you could also route your current yahoo / gmail account through the QQ mail app on a smartphone.

[Cantabile]

I have been using an outlook account so far when gmail doesn't work. It works pretty well without a vpn for emails and stuff, one drive (cloud storage) doesn't seem to work as well without a vpn.

[Guest]

Thanks for the responses. I'll have a look at QQ later - does it offer services in English or only Mandarin?

[LinZhenPu]

For those who want to stay within Chinese while on this language learning journey, I can recommend mail.163.com by Netease. It's an intuitive interface that is easy to figure out, and it works very well.

[AdamD]

163 (Netease/网易) mail is also IMAP friendly, which means you can use it easily with mail clients. The biggest problem I have is that mail.163.com is on spam lists in the west, so emails don't get through to recipients a lot of the time.

[LinZhenPu]

You'd think that by now almost everybody who uses email would be used to checking their spam folder for an expected email that has not arrived in their inbox, but I digress.

[Angelina]

Unless you are emailing someone who doesn't know you on something really important and after checking their spam folder they think your email is spam. 

[LinZhenPu]

Perhaps it's due to my social ineptitude, but I can't think of a situation where you would have something that important to write to someone who doesn't know you or wouldn't recognize such an important topic. In that type of situation, wouldn't there be some other way of letting them know that there is something really important that they need to know about? Ie a phone number or a way of getting someone to pass on the message...?

There's no harm in checking the content of emails you don't recognize, just potential harm in clicking links or opening attachments.

[AdamD]

Some workplaces use an email quarantine system that never gets to the recipients unless they go out of their way to sift through them all. If they see an email from a domain they've never heard of with a Chinese-phonetic username they don't recognise (which is what has happened to me), they never even look at the contents. Some get >50 spam messages a day and long ago gave up checking their spam box.

[LinZhenPu]

Ah. Well, that makes it difficult. Then, the only way is to use a VPN. I have heard of a start-up company who has software that circumvents the GFW to let clients access google services including gmail from within China, but I cannot remember the name. If they are still around and their software still works as intended, it could be a good alternative to purchasing a VPN subscription if all you need a VPN for is to access google services.

[Guest]

[Deleted].