Just one more reason to avoid using free public email for business. If you do business in China, as a lot of companies do, you’ll have people traveling to the Far East from time to time. And when they do, they’ll need to check their company email on a regular basis.

Having spent quite a lot of time in Asia myself, I know that a high-speed connection isn’t always available. It can be frustrating trying to log onto the email system back home with a slow dial-up from China. Even the machines at the Internet cafes can be excruciatingly slow. It’s faster just to send out those emails to your business associates and co-workers from your Hotmail account. You just want to get the messages out, and get on with your trip to see the Great Wall. But should you resort to that Hotmail account as a quick shortcut? No. Besides the appearance of unprofessionalism, there’s always the risk of having your emails mistaken for spam. And this month, the Chinese government has given us another reason to avoid it.

After July 1, all PCs sold in China will have to be equipped with Web filtering software selected by the government. The requirement is ostensibly to protect children from online porn sites. But laws designed to do so in the US, such as the Children’s Internet Protection Act, require filtering on computers that children actually use–that is, computers in schools. The Chinese government just makes everybody use it. Some see the move as less an attempt to protect children, and more a ruse for controlling access to external news sites.  China did block access to Microsoft’s Bing search engine for example recently, along with YouTube, Twitter, and Hotmail, in anticipation of the 20th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre.

If you’re doing business in China, and plan to make use of free public email to stay in touch, or even to use Twitter or another social networking site, don’t count on getting access to it.