Chinese Internet censors blamed for email chaos

BEIJING (Reuters) - Internet users and company officials in China on Wednesday blamed a series of disruptions to cross-border email traffic on adjustments to the country's vast Internet surveillance system.

IT company executives offered varying explanations for the email disruptions, but agreed they were not a result of standard technical problems.

China is in the midst of a highly publicized campaign to rein in "unhealthy content" in its rapidly growing Internet, whose rapid spread of information regarding incidents of government corruption and rural unrest not reported in conventional media has alarmed China's stability-obsessed leaders.

"We have had hundreds of complaints from our clients in the last couple of days," said Richard Ford, technical director of Candis Group, a Beijing-based IT company that processes hundreds of thousands of emails a day.

"It would have been nice if the authorities could have warned us about this."

Ford said clients complained of emails being returned with error messages that could only have been placed by a "third party" between local and foreign mail servers.

"At first we thought this was our problem ... but after investigations, we are certain it is related to China's great firewall," Ford said, referring to the elaborate system of filters China maintains to intercept and block sensitive content from entering its sprawling Internet.

Several other IT companies managing email servers confirmed Internet users and clients in China and overseas had complained of having trouble sending and receiving emails.

"This often happens but usually only for a few hours, maybe a day at most," Gao Miao, IT manager at Beijing-based consultancy BDA China, told Reuters.