I didn't think that was possible! Did they block access to gmail itself?

Nope, that opens but then when gmail chat tries to load it says that access has been blocked on this network and that I should contact my admin.

I've seen that message (because DNS on the 'secret' network at work is veerrry slow) but, in my case, it goes away after a few minutes. Sympathies.

It won't help for gmail, but terrapin just turned me on to meebo.com. It rocks, as the kids say.

Well that's a bummer dude.

now get back to work!

Here at The Big Company, I can't access any webmail, chat, IM, forum or most shopping sites. That includes MeFi and MoFi but not MeCha. I have a backdoor via a Linux box in Research but it's down for a while due to a move.

Have you tried the Google Talk client?

I have the opposite problem. Google Talk works but gmail is blocked. So when GT gives me a new mail notification, I can see that I received mail, and the alert shows me the first few words of the mail, but I can't actually open it and read it. Evil.

I am seriously considering setting up a VNC server at home.

meebo is very cool. . .

I found out about meebo last month and came to work all excited that I could get on yahoo again. Nope. Blocked. Argh.

Yeah, the MegaCorp where I worked blocked all of Gmail, but I did get the subject/several word preview through the custom Google homepage. If something interesting came through, I would check on my blackberry. But then they blocked access to gmail on the blackberries too! Evil! I could still use my personal cell phone though.

I was always paranoid that they would block Metafilter. I don't know how these things are monitored, but I spent hours a day on mefi. I'm surprised no one caught one. If I would've actually done work all that time, I would've been fucking CEO in no time.

Flash and Shockwave are blocked at work, as well as anything downloadable, all attachments are stripped from email (including html) and you have to beg IT to release the Word document someone's sent that you really, really need. It's a giant pain in the bum.

Doesn't stop me (and 90% of the workforce) from skiving off though.

OMG, jan, that's draconian even by government standards. It saddens me to think of all the lost productivity over blanket policies like this.

Heh, it saddens me to think of all the productivity lost to chatting and idle surfing on unblocked sites. Like I'm doing right now!