Microsoft's Hotmail was today drawn into controversy over e-mail snooping after a Chinese journalist was charged with sending subversive reports abroad through the webmail service.

Li Yuanlong, 45, a reporter with the daily Bijie Ribao in the poor southern province of Guizghou used the pseudonym Ye Lang (Night Wolf) to file articles on issues such as unemployment and rural poverty to US-based Chinese-language news portals.

Details of the indictment emerged today through the New York-based group Human Rights in China, five months after Li was detained. Li Jianqiang, his solicitor, said that he expected his client to appear in court this week on a charge of "incitement to subvert state power".

The charges laid against Li follow accusations that Yahoo! provided evidence leading to the imprisonment of two Chinese journalists. Google has also come under fire for bowing to pressure to self-censor controversial search results in its dedicated google.cn Chinese service.

The indictment, a copy of which was given to Li’s wife Yang Xiumin, according to the Reuters news agency, specified the e-mail company as Hotmail, the webmail pioneer owned by Microsoft Corp.

Li was charged with sending essays that "fabricated, distorted and exaggerated facts, incited to subvert the state and sought to overthrow the socialist system", it said.

It is not known whether Hotmail was asked to co-operate with the action against Li.

The articles were sent to two Chinese-language news portals banned in China and hosted in America. They included the essays "On Becoming an American in Spirit" and "The Banal Nature of Life and the Lamentable Nature of Death", said to be critical of Chinese governmental policies.

Hotmail was commercially launched on July 4, 1996 - Independence Day in America - symbolically representing freedom from Internet Service Providers.

When contacted by the Reuters news agency, Microsoft Corp declined to comment.

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