Hi Gary,

It’s certainly possible. We’ve had a few such similar problems, a notable one also being with a New Zealand client with a Chinese branch office. For a long time we couldn’t see how the authorities could have been consistently blocking both POP3 content downloaded from NZ to China and HTTP traffic from the webmail system, but we couldn’t make it work reliably, and nobody in NZ was having any problems.

If the person in China is relatively computer-savvy it would be worth walking them through the process of retrieving mail over ssh using putty or a similar program to see if that gets you any joy. I’m not sure how much this increases the likelihood of your staff member in China getting a visit from men in dark suits with sunglasses, but it seemed to do the trick for us.

Can you be a bit more specific about what you mean when you say “consistent difficulty accessing our mail server”? Do you get a certain error message when connecting to POP3 or viewing webmail? Do emails just disappear en route from NZ to China and vice versa?

Cheers,

Erin