Rediff has announced a new product that is promising to be an alternative. It is basically an email service that can send back html emails to the user. The user initiates the process in his email client by sending a specifically crafted email to the WebinMail service which will render the requested webpage and send it back to the email account as a html email.

WebinMail states that the service is currently only working in Microsoft Outlook or Blackberry devices but it did work fine in Mozilla Thunderbird as well and might work fine in most email clients supporting html messages.

All that needs to be done to initiate the connection is to send an email to browse@webinmail.com with an url in the subject line (e.g. www.ghacks.net)

The process is not in realtime obviously which is also the greatest flaw of it. It took a few minutes before the html email arrived in the inbox. This is excellent for viewing specific pages on a website but not the prime solution for surfing many pages of blocked websites.

The subject line can contain other parameters as well, they are:

• google:query
• googleimg:query
• rediff:query

All three will perform a search for the query entered by the user and return the results in a html mail.

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All forms are added as well in another layer, including search boxes and the like for instance. The Picidae test server is really fast and was able to deliver an image of Ghacks in just a few seconds, did not take much longer than loading the websites normally. The script is offered on the website as well and everyone may setup a Picidae server on his own dedicated server.

Even webspace owners can take part by offering an additional layer of protection. They can install a Picidae proxy that is connected to a Picidae server. This would mean that even if the server would be blocked it could still be accessed by using a Picidae proxy.

Picidae is especially useful when searching Google or other search engines in a country that is know to block certain search results. The Picidae script is able to query the search engines that are outside of your country which means that you will receive uncensored search results.

Read More:

Picidae Test Server
Picidae Server Script

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After discovering this they decided to ban URLs starting with ‘feeds’, ‘blog’, ‘rss’ and probably a handful of other related words. Several of my readers from China mentioned to me that my feed was blocked in China as well but the website was not. So, they started visiting my website again.

If you want to check if your website or feed is blocked as well in China you can use the website test behind the Great Firewall of China to do so. Just enter the url of your website, blog or feed, choose a location (Hong Kong, Beijing or Shanghai), enter the validation code and wait for a response from the script.

An alternative to RSS feeds is to get those feeds by mail or using a service on the web that displays them. Newsgator is supposed to work fine at the moment. It would be nice to receive information about Netvibes and Google Reader.

Read More:

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There is a quick solution for accessing those contents and I would like to introduce it here. All that you need is some webspace on the Internet and php support there. You can take a look at free hosting solutions for instance and sign up at one of the sites mentioned there or you could pay about $6 and get your own domain name and some webspace for about $4 per month.

The advantage of your own domain name is that you will have an email account associated with it which you can normally use to check and send emails from using a webmailer. This is helpful if websites such as gmail, hotmail and yahoo mail are blocked in your network as well.

Accessing blocked websites:

All you need to do is to find a web proxy that is working. You could search the Internet for working ones or upload and use your own web proxy. The latter method has several advantages. It is unlikely that a proxy gets banned that is not causing lots of traffic. The difference between one user who is visiting blocked websites and dozens is noticeable.

Another advantage is that the proxy will not get banned if the administrator decides to block a list of proxies that he found on the Internet. Yours will not be in that list because no one but you knows about it.

I suggest to use the script mentioned at the end of this article. The PHP proxy script just needs to be moved to the webserver, no installation is necessary on your part. Create a new directory on your webspace and make sure you name it inconspicuously, holidays or something like that.

It could be a good move to password protect that directory using a simply .htaccess file. You need to make sure that your hoster has that enabled. If he has use the Htaccess Password Generator to generate a password and protect the directory with the proxy.

Send and Receive Emails:

Sending Emails is not a problem if you have your own webspace with php enabled. You can simply upload one of the many contact forms like the one mentioned at the end of this article. You do need to change one file to add your email address to it. In the case of the contact form that I mentioned below it is the file output.php. Just edit the existing email address to yours twice and you are ready to go.

Upload the script to your webspace and send emails to your account. This is great for quick note taking, sending urls for instance or to do lists.

Checking your mails is a little bit more complicated and I suggest to use the webmailer of a webhosting company for this. Another possibility would be to find a webmail provider that is not banned in your network yet. Search for small ones in Google using terms like ‘free email accounts’ and similar search strings.

To be able to read all of your mail you could simply forward the mail from other accounts to this one. This would make it possible to read all of your mails while in the network that has most of the webmailers, including your default one, blocked.

Read More:

Free PHP Hoster List
PHP Proxy Script
Htaccess Password Generator
Mini Me Contact Form

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