FAQ

What is Anon.Cat?

Free file hosting with no account and no signup. Drop a file, get a link.

How long do files last?

A file is deleted once it goes 30 days without a single download. Every download restarts the clock, so a link people use stays alive and a link nobody touches cleans itself up.

How much can I upload?

Up to 1 GB per file, and 10 GB per 24 hours in total. Large uploads are sent in pieces and resume where they stopped, so a dropped connection does not mean starting over.

How anonymous is it?

There is no account, no email and no signup, so we never learn who you are.

We do not store your IP address with your upload, and we do not keep the name your file had on your computer. Every file is given a random name instead. What we keep is the random name, the file's size and when it was uploaded, which is what the service needs to serve it and expire it.

Files are delivered by our CDN rather than from a machine we run. Like any CDN it keeps its own access logs, and we read them for one thing only: to tell whether a file has been downloaded recently, so an active link is not deleted. To enforce the upload limit we hold a short-lived one-way token; it cannot be turned back into your address and it is discarded within 24 hours.

What files are allowed?

Anything legal in the Netherlands that you have the right to publish. Malware is removed at our discretion.

What is Anon.Paste?

Anon.Paste is the text side of Anon.Cat. Pick a lifetime from 10 minutes to 24 hours, or never, and never means never: it is kept until you delete it.

Are password protected pastes encrypted?

Yes. The text is encrypted with XChaCha20-Poly1305 and the key comes from your password via Argon2id. Only ciphertext is written to disk.

Your password is never stored, not even hashed, so we cannot read a protected paste and neither can anyone who steals the database. It also means a forgotten password cannot be recovered. Choose one you will remember.

What is Anon.Mail?

Anon.Mail is the mailbox side of Anon.Cat. Pick a name, take yourname@anon.cat, and read what arrives. No signup, no phone number, no recovery address. Mail sent to yourname+anything@anon.cat lands in the same box, which is how you tell who passed your address on.

Is the address really mine?

First come, first served, with no exceptions. Whoever claims a name keeps it. There is no trademark process, no brand claim, no waiting list, no queue to jump and no way to buy a name off the person holding it. We do not reassign addresses, we do not resell them, and we do not free one up because somebody wants it badly or insists they have a right to it. Mail asking us to take a name off its holder gets no reply.

Nor does the address expire. There is no inactivity clock on it: ignore a mailbox for years and it is still yours when you come back. Only two things end that, and both are yours. Delete the mailbox and the name goes back in the pool for anyone. Lose the password and the mailbox is dead to you, but the name stays taken, so nobody else inherits it either.

What anyone can ask us for is thin by design. Behind the name there is a hashed password and nothing else: no phone number, no recovery address, no identity, no payment. So a demand to know who holds an address hits the same wall as the file host, which is that it was never written down. We answer genuine legal process from an official government domain to the extent the law in the Netherlands requires, and we bin anyone who merely claims that authority. Short of that, your mailbox is not ours to hand over, discuss or take away.

Can I send mail from it?

Not by default. Anon.Mail receives only, and that is deliberate rather than unfinished: an anonymous free sender would be relaying spam within a week, and the cost of that lands on everyone whose anon.cat links stop being delivered.

Supporters are the exception. If you have donated $25 or more, you can ask us to enable sending on your mailbox and use it to write and reply like an ordinary account.

The money is not really the point. It ties a mailbox to a payment, and that is the one thing nobody sending spam at scale is willing to do, so it buys accountability without us having to ask who you are. To request it, write to info@anon.cat with the mailbox name and proof of the donation. It is enabled by hand, so give us a little time.

Sending is a switch on a mailbox and nothing more. It buys no claim over any other name, it does not expire, and the only thing that turns it off again is using it to spam, which costs everyone here their delivery.

How long is mail kept?

Indefinitely. Nothing here deletes your mail on a timer, and there is no cap on how much a mailbox holds. A message stays until you delete it, and so does the address.

Worth saying plainly, since it is the opposite of how the file host works: that means anything sent to you is still sitting here in a year unless you remove it. Delete what you do not want kept. Anything up to 50 MB per message is accepted.

What if I lose the mailbox password?

Then the mailbox is gone. The password is shown once when you claim the address, only its Argon2id hash is stored, and there is no second address to send a reset link to. That is the price of not asking who you are. Write it down.

For the same reason, do not point anything that matters at one of these addresses. No password resets, no banking, no account recovery. Any name nobody has claimed can be claimed by anyone, and a mailbox you delete puts its name straight back in the pool.

Where are your servers?

Anon.Cat is operated from the Netherlands, the jurisdiction our policies and any takedown notice are handled under. Downloads come from a network of servers across Europe and North America, so a file is served from near you.

How do I report or remove a file?

Send the link to abuse@anon.cat. Copyright claims are dealt with as soon as possible. For anything else, such as defamation, we act on a certified court order from the Netherlands.

Understand up front that removing the file is the whole of what we can do. There are no accounts here. We do not record uploaders' IP addresses, we do not keep the filename a file had on someone's computer, and every upload is stored under a random name. So there is no "who uploaded this" for us to look up: it was never written down in the first place. A request for that information gets the same answer every time, which is that it does not exist.

We are not investigators and have no means to be. If content is illegal, take it to the appropriate law enforcement agency rather than to us.

We ignore anything claiming legal authority that does not come from an official government domain. Mail asserting police or court powers from a free mailbox, a lookalike domain or an ordinary company address is treated as fraudulent and binned without reply. Genuine requests come through official channels from a verifiable government address, and we answer those to the extent the law in the Netherlands requires. That answer will still usually be that we hold nothing useful.

I have a question...

Email info@anon.cat.