| Sina Mail | |
|---|---|
| Domains | sina.com, sina.cn, vip.sina.com |
| Mail routing | freemx1 through freemx3.sinamail.sina.com.cn for sina.com and sina.cn, and a separate set under vip.sina.com for the paid tier, in September 2026. |
| What we can resolve | We resolve few mailboxes here |
How Sina Mail answers a probe
What the server does when we open a connection and ask about one address.
- Connections from foreign IP ranges are frequently refused or left to time out.
- Where a probe completes, rejections for unknown recipients are possible, but the reachable sample is not representative.
- The sina.cn short domain shares its mail hosts with sina.com, while the vip tier publishes hosts of its own.
- Sina's consumer mail position has declined relative to QQ and NetEase.
The part that catches people out
What we do about it
We report Sina addresses as unknown with the connection failure named. Coverage on a Chinese consumer list is low for everyone and we would rather state that than manufacture verdicts.
Sending to Sina Mail mailboxes
Verification is one step. These are the things that decide whether the message lands.
- Commercial email into China carries regulatory requirements worth checking before any send.
- Chinese consumer messaging runs through WeChat far more than email.
- There is no meaningful postmaster tooling available to foreign senders here.
freemx and vip: the tier is in the hostname
Sina's DNS tells you which kind of account you're looking at. On September 19, 2026, sina.com and sina.cn both returned freemx1, freemx2 and freemx3.sinamail.sina.com.cn. vip.sina.com, the paid tier, returned its own set of hosts under vip.sina.com. Two groups of servers, split by whether the user pays.
Say a trading company's contact sheet has 220 Sina rows, 190 on sina.com and 30 on vip.sina.com. From outside China, expect most of both groups to come back unknown with a connection failure. The split still earns its keep. Someone paying for a vip mailbox in 2026 is making a choice to keep using it, so if you're going to spend effort reaching anyone by hand, start with those 30. Send a short personal note from your own mailbox and see who writes back.
Your failed telnet proves less than you think
It's natural to test this yourself: open a terminal, try to connect to freemx1.sinamail.sina.com.cn on port 25, and watch it hang. That result is nearly worthless. Most home and office internet providers block outbound port 25, and so do many cloud hosts, so the connection may have died a few miles from your desk. Try the same command against a server you know is reachable. If that hangs too, you've measured your own network.
The same caution applies to vendor claims in both directions. "We can't reach Sina" and "we verify Sina fine" are both statements about where the probing machines sit. Ask for the location, and ask what share of Sina rows on a typical list get a definitive verdict. A straight answer will include a figure well below the vendor's headline accuracy, along with a plain statement that the rows that came back unknown weren't charged.
Questions people ask
Why can Sina addresses not be verified?
Because the connection usually does not complete from outside China. There is no response to read, so there is no verdict to give.
Would another verifier do better?
Only one probing from inside the region. Any vendor returning confident Chinese consumer verdicts at volume from abroad is inferring rather than measuring.
Is Sina still widely used?
Less than it was. QQ and NetEase carry more Chinese consumer email, and messaging apps carry more communication than email does.