How do I get around gmail blocks at work?

September 26, 2006 9:38 AM

How can I get around my works' block on gmail?

I believe my company has blocked gmail access. I can get it on my portable device and other people we know can get it, so it seems like it's not the Internet or gmail. I don't want to switch to another email service. Is there any way of getting around this? I've looked at this and found it helpful but no cigar.

-- We can't alter our home pages.

-- So far, hidemyass.com and megaproxy don't work. Hotmail and yahoo do seem to work, but I'm reluctant to switch or do email forwarding. Getting to gmail through any other gmail url variants doesn't seem to work. I don't have internet access at home, so I don't know about remote log-ins.

-- No one else at work can get it, but for some reason (I think because I had a very me-specific bookmark set-up) I can still get it. However, I don't have googlechat and I can't send messages and 80% of the time, the messages don't open. It looks like I can see what's in my inbox and sometimes I can read messages.

--Is there a list of gmail url variants online?

Thanks for all your help

posted by johnasdf to Computers & Internet (22 answers total)

My work blocked www.gmail.com but not mail.google.com probably not helpful though.
posted by robofunk at 9:40 AM on September 26, 2006

Is it just today that you've been having problems? Gmail has been uber-flaky today with really long load times and many error messages.
posted by bshort at 9:42 AM on September 26, 2006

Best answer: ssh to your gmail and read it over lynx. It works!
posted by By The Grace of God at 9:43 AM on September 26, 2006 [2 favorites]

That's good to know. It seems to be down over here - page not found. Which is not the same as hitting the corporate firewall. I can still access other webmail accounts, so it may just be some gmail issues.
posted by canine epigram at 9:43 AM on September 26, 2006

Response by poster: I was wondering if it was just gmail's flakiness, but we've had unofficial confirmation that it's an office crackdown!
posted by johnasdf at 9:44 AM on September 26, 2006

Best answer: you could set up gmail-mobile on your own server and read it from there. use meebo.com for chat.
posted by bonaldi at 9:49 AM on September 26, 2006 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Sorry, can you explain how to ssh to gmail? We can't really install programs at work--can I still use lynx? Is that the kind of thing you can install on a memorystick?
posted by johnasdf at 9:49 AM on September 26, 2006

Best answer: do you have a Linux box at home?

You install it on your home box. Then take a memory stick with PuTTy on it and ssh to your account on your home box, then run lynx and go to www.gmail.com.
posted by By The Grace of God at 10:01 AM on September 26, 2006

Best answer: I don't have any blocks here but I see no reason to let anyone see what I'm looking at. My solution has three pieces, one optional.

One, at home on my cable modem I have a linksys box with one of the free replacement firmwares. This is necessary for my scheme because it supports ssh access and has a SOCKS proxy on it. There's probably more robust solutions but I like a solid-state solution for my home network.

Two, here at work I run Tunnelier to connect to that ssh server at home (hooray www.dyndns.org) and have the SOCKS/HTTP Proxy forwarding service turned on.

Three, I use FoxyProxy with Firefox. However before I found it I simply set the connections settings in Firefox to use a SOCKS proxy at 127.0.0.1:1080, the ssh-tunneled SOCKS channel that Tunnelier runs.

The only real downside was adding the exclusions (192.168.1.1/16 for all our internal stuff, plus our internal domains, etc) is clunky on the one small line Firefox allows. Using FoxyProxy I have everything default to that ssh+SOCKS and add exception to another 'proxy' that is, in fact, the direct connect option.

I've also excepted *.google.com/*, *.perl*, etc - a few others that are so blatantly work-related that I don't mind them being seen.
posted by phearlez at 10:20 AM on September 26, 2006

Can you set up your gmail to forward copies of all your mail to your work email? That's what I do. Hope I don't get fired. Of course, if you need access RIGHT NOW, that doesn't help you.
posted by peep at 10:52 AM on September 26, 2006

Be careful. Intentionally defeating Internet access restrictions is probably grounds for for-cause termination in your employee manual (i.e., no severance, and no grounds to deny your unemployment benefits, as well).
posted by MattD at 10:53 AM on September 26, 2006

that is to say, with grounds to deny your unemployment benefits...
posted by MattD at 10:55 AM on September 26, 2006

Best answer: Run a vnc server on your home computer, as described here:
http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/45675#698246
Then, VNC into your own computer and email away.

I've also gotten around restrictions at a work place by using portable firefox and a proxy server.
posted by chrisamiller at 10:58 AM on September 26, 2006

Response by poster: These are great suggestions. My only problem is I don't have Internet at home, since it distracts me too much. I might consider getting it if this keeps going. Do you have any suggestions that don't involve tunneling/VNC? I'll try downloading firefox to my memory stick.
posted by johnasdf at 11:56 AM on September 26, 2006

These are great suggestions. My only problem is I don't have Internet at home, since it distracts me too much.

You are my hero.
posted by mecran01 at 1:58 PM on September 26, 2006

This may be your best bet: http://torpark.nfshost.com/

In addition to proxies, it uses ports other than the default for HTTP, so this may or may not help you. It might help you because many types of filtering software works by adding a rule\statement in your firewall that sends all traffic on ports 80 (HTTP), 443 (HTTPS) and 21 (FTP) to a server (Bess, Websense, ect.) to be filtered and then sent back out through the firewall. Using another port would allow you to bypass the filter. It won't help you if your company sets up their firewall to ONLY allows ports 80, 443 and 21 through. All other ports are blocked. This would also probably stop you from using ssh.

There are services that will send you an email with a brand new proxy every day (it takes the software companies a few days to add them to their lists and update their clients' databases), but that can be hit or miss as well because the sites get blocked so quickly. You can also keep trying proxy sites until you find one that was accidently miscategorized by the software companies (and there plenty of those).

Either way, I would recommend either making a sincere request to your IT department to allow web-based email or just give up and get Internet service at home. If you tried any of my suggestions or most of the ones above (I didn't bother to carefully investigate all of them) I could definitely catch you.* Just remember that EVERYTHING you do is most likely logged somewhere. It really depends how strict your company is on these matters. I have things like port tunneling and proxy usage written into the agreement all employees sign when hired (although I'm sure none of them actually read it).

* I don't have time to sift through logs and run reports all day long to catch users playing on MySpace. I personally think blocking things like web-based email is ridiculous. My users are blocked from almost nothing other than porn and gambling because we consider them to be professionals. However, I should note that I have run usage reports for managers who requested them and they did lead to write-ups, suspensions and firings (but these were for excessive Internet misuse, not browsing eBay).
posted by bda1972 at 4:06 PM on September 26, 2006

I recently had the same problem, and found a way to at least be able to read my mail. Set up a personalized Google home page, then add the Gmail module to it. It shows a small preview of your inbox, and allows you to click on an email to read the entire message.
posted by nbSean at 4:49 PM on September 26, 2006

MattD writes "Be careful. Intentionally defeating Internet access restrictions is probably grounds for for-cause termination in your employee manual (i.e., no severance, and no grounds to deny your unemployment benefits, as well)."

Bears repeating.

Also, they have good reason for this--as I have said many times before, they are paying for your time. They are paying you to work. They are not paying for you to dick around with your personal email. Yes, some companies are relaxed about this. Mine certainly is. But some are not, and yours has proven this.

Jesus.

johnasdf writes "These are great suggestions. My only problem is I don't have Internet at home, since it distracts me too much."

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 6:51 PM on September 26, 2006

since it distracts me too much

I wonder if that's why you're not allowed to have Gmail at work...
posted by emelenjr at 7:04 PM on September 26, 2006

Tunnelier is a nice piece of shareware. For the purposes of setting up a tunnel for SOCKS, PuTTY works just as well and is free.

There's a pretty good step-by-step here.

On preview: if you haven't a sympathetic machine to set up a tunnel to, maybe you could enable POP3 on your Gmail account, and add it to whatever email client is installed on your workstation (which I'm guessing is probably Outlook, in an organization anal enough to filter webmail).

Instructions are here (that's a mail.google.com address, so post back here if it's blocked from where you are).
posted by flabdablet at 7:10 PM on September 26, 2006

Something else that might be worth trying: use https://mail.google.com/ instead of http://mail.google.com/.

If you can get to your Gmail inbox at all this way (and your partial success with your me-specific bookmark suggests you can) then your company firewall is unlikely to be able to control what your browser and Gmail say to each other over the secured connection.

Something else that might be causing this partial blockage is random Javascript breakage due to hamfisted application of Group Policy in an attempt to secure Internet Explorer. It hadn't occurred to me until just then that you might actually be using Internet Explorer. If you are, switch immediately to Portable Firefox.

Another wrinkle on the POP3 method, if it works, might be to use Portable Thunderbird; this would mean your precious personal mails would stay on your own USB drive instead of a corporate hard disk.
posted by flabdablet at 7:48 PM on September 26, 2006

Another trick worth trying is to use one of the 'personalized web pages' like protopage or goowy that can access your gmail through a plugin.
posted by mattholomew at 8:14 PM on September 26, 2006