Iran removes block on Gmail again after a week

The Iranian government has removed the block on Gmail again after only a week, with ministers in parliament showing their dissent against the sudden loss of one of the most popular email services.

Iran's sudden removal of Gmail access has been a cause of quite a lot of discussion. Despite government promises that they would have the 'Fajr' email service ('Dawn' in English) up and running before too long, it seems people want their gigabytes of free inbox storage more than they want an Iranian alternative.

The Iranian parliament is up in arms alongside the population. In what was surely the most neutrally worded statement of the past week, Hussein Garrousi of the Parliamentarian committee on industry told an independent newspaper that "some problems have emerged through the blocking of Gmail".

Access to Gmail was revoked on September 24, but things are back to normal. What you gain in one area is lost in another, so now their attention is on YouTube. Mohammad Reza Miri explained the following to a news agency:

We absolutely do not want YouTube to be accessible. That is why the telecommunications ministry is seeking a solution to fix the problem to block YouTube under the HTTPS protocol while leaving Gmail accessible.

In other words they blocked the wrong site. Good job, lads. Iran has given YouTube the cold shoulder since the election controversy within the country after the 2009 re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The government was caught doing a cheeky bit of Photoshopping back then in an attempt to increase support for the returning president.

Source: Google