It is well known that the Chinese government blocks access within China to sites such as CNN, BBC and Geocities. Recently, google and altavista have also been temporarily blocked.
Since we moved from Singapore to France, my wife has problems in getting emails in Chinese language to China. She uses the same software as in Singapore, but the emails arrive illegible. We have tried to see whether this is due to the French internet provider, but when she sends an email in Chinese from her Yahoo account to mine, it arrives perfectly legible.
Does anybody know whether this is a new type of censorship, or whether it is some kind of fluke?
It does not sound like censorship at all. It sounds like the emails are being corrupted along the way due to passing some servers which may not support certain things. Encode it in plain ascii 7 bit text and it should arrive ok.
Or maybe send them as an attachment. You could also use the free PGP encryption for email.
Does it matter the type of text used in the email to the servers passing on the packets? They never decode them and usually don’t even see them all (or even at the same time) right?
Some servers still use the old system and only pass 7 bits, stripping the eighth. Use the right encoding and it should go through without loss. Use 8 bits and you lose information
sounds like a fluke. Google is now working fine, so I don’t know what that was all about? I mean I know it was blocked for a while but just checked and everything is hunky dory.
I regularly forward banned news about China to my friends there either in clear or encrypted and I have never had any problems. If the OP was a case of censorship the emails would just disappear. It clearly seems a case of not mastering the different encoding systems. In Outlook Express you can try MIME or UUEncode in your settings. I believe UUEncode should pass 7 bit channels without loss.