Gmail, Yahoo mail and Myanmar

Visitors to Myanmar would still remember the feeling of totally cut off from their friends and families outside Myanmar (Burma). Telephone call to foreign countries from Myanmar (Burma) is quite expensive. Mobile phones are not readily available until recently (when the government introduces a new prepaid GSM mobile phone cards), and all those popular web mails are blocked in Myanmar. If you are using Gmail or Yahoo mail as your primary contact email, you are now in deep trouble. You cannot access these mails from Myanmar, and you are totally disconnected. All you will see is a welcome screen of “This website is blocked by your ISP”. I am deeply sorry.

However, please keep calm. You are not totally disconnected. There are ways to connect with your friends via your favorite mail. Myanmar people are genius at improvisation when resources are scarce. Email and internet is no exception. All you need to do is head to a local internet cafe which is now quite easy to find in Yangon (Rangoon) and Mandalay (but still a rarity in other cities), and ask the owner that you want to use your gmail. More often than not, he will be willing to show you how to bypass the ISP ban on gmail. Indeed, almost all the internet cafes in Myanmar install or provide some program or proxy website to bypass the ISP ban on gmail. (They have to. Otherwise, there won’t be any customer at all). Usually, this is done by a popular “Freedom” software which is a proxy software to bypass the ISP firewall, or by using https protocol in gmail. For reasons nobody knows, Myanmar ISP does not block this https protocol from Gmail. (Or may be they cannot). Anyway, until now, users of gmail in Myanmar can still bypass the ISP ban on gmail by these methods. (Although it can changed overnight). However, due to a limited bandwidth of internet connection in Myanmar, use of a proxy software is painfully slow, and cut off many time. So it is better to use the https protocol in gmail. It is also more secure. For Yahoo mail, one solution is to use the mobile version of the Yahoo mail, as it is not blocked in Myanmar.

Although the internet in Myanmar is painfully slow, and most popular webmails blocked, it really is a relief for everyone that you are still accessible to your email, and hence the world.

Related posts:

1. Internet Cafe in Myanmar
2. Living in Yangon (Rangoon) as an expatriate
3. Domestic Air Travel Advice in Myanmar
4. PCO – Public Phones in Myanmar
5. Telecommunication in Myanmar