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.
There are limits, and they are not up for discussion. Nothing that sexually exploits a child. No intimate images of anyone published without their consent. No malware. Nothing whose purpose is to hound a private person. None of that is a grey area here and none of it survives a report.
We are anonymous, not indifferent. Nobody has to say who they are to use this, and that is the whole point of it. It was never a licence to take somebody else's dignity. Whoever you are and wherever you are from, the person at the other end of a link deserves the same protection you came here for.
If you find something like that here, or a new trick being used to get round us, write to abuse@anon.cat. No account, no form, no explanation needed. One link is enough. We would rather hear it from you than read about it later.
Do you scan what I upload?
Yes. Files are scanned for known malware, and only for that. Every upload is checked before it is given a link. If it matches, it is refused and never stored.
Nobody should lose their machine for opening a link from here. Being untraceable is not worth being the thing that wrecks a stranger's year.
The scan reads the file and nothing else. It does not know who uploaded it, it does not ask, and it writes nothing down. No record of you is created by it.
It catches what is already known. Something new can still get through, and we will not pretend otherwise. This is not a promise that every file here is safe. Treat anything you download from a stranger as exactly that.
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.
Pastes are plain text by default. Pick a language to get syntax highlighting with line numbers, or choose Detect automatically and let it work the language out.
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.Notes?
Anon.Notes is a private notebook at an address you pick, behind a password you pick. It is for moving text between your own devices without signing in to anything: write it on your phone, open the link on a machine you would rather not log in on.
Two layouts, and you can switch between them at any time without losing anything. A page is one long document you edit in place. A log is entries stacked one under the other. Both take simple formatting, and both take images, up to 5 MB each, kept on our own server rather than on the CDN.
There is no account and no email address involved. A note’s address and its password can both be changed later from inside the note. A note is deleted after 180 days without being opened, and opening it resets that clock, so one you actually use never expires.
What if I lose a note's password?
Then the note is gone. There is no reset, no recovery address, and nothing we can do about it. Write the password down before you close the page that shows it.
The note is encrypted with XChaCha20-Poly1305, and the key comes from your password via Argon2id. The images in it are encrypted the same way. We do not store your password, or anything that could undo that encryption, so somebody who took the database - or the whole server - would have noise.
While a note is open the key sits in a cookie in your own browser, which is what lets the page render at all. So the accurate version is this: nothing we keep on disk can read your note, and there is no copy of your password here to find, to hand over, or to give up under pressure.
What is Anon.Scrub?
A photo is not only a picture. Your phone writes a second layer into the same file: where the shot was taken, accurate to a few metres; when; which camera and lens; and on many cameras a serial number that ties every photo you have ever posted back to the same device. None of it shows in the image.
This is not theoretical. It is how John McAfee was found in Guatemala in 2012 - a magazine published a photo of him and left the coordinates sitting inside the file. Police forensics teams read these fields as routine. So does the advertising industry: Google, Meta and Amazon take most of the world's digital advertising money between them, and all of it is spent on knowing where you were and guessing what you will do next.
Every file uploaded to Anon.Cat is stripped automatically. Exif and GPS out of a JPEG, text and eXIf chunks out of a PNG, Exif and XMP out of a WebP. The picture itself is not altered by a single byte, colour profiles are kept so nothing looks different, and anything that is not one of those three formats is stored exactly as you sent it. There is nothing to switch on.
Anon.Scrub is the same tool as a page, for a photo you are about to send somewhere that will not clean it for you. It runs entirely in your browser: that file is never uploaded, not even to us.
What is Anon.News?
A searchable record of supportive acts directed at Israel by other countries and organisations - aid, pledges, defence, agreements, recognition and solidarity - with every entry linked to the article it came from. Filter it by country, by date, by the kind of support, or by whether a sum was stated.
It is a positive-only feed, and the page says so. It collects supportive acts and discards everything else, so it is a curated record rather than a balanced summary of coverage about Israel, and nothing should be read into what is absent from it.
How do you know the entries are real?
Automatic news coders label an article with what they think happened in it, and on this subject they are wrong a great deal of the time - we measured it: protests filed as military aid pledges, donations to Gaza filed as aid to Israel. So every candidate passes two independent checks: fixed rules over the real headline, and then a language model that reads the headline and summary and judges whether that actor really did that supportive thing for Israel.
Anything failing either check is not shown, and anything that could not be checked is not shown either - it waits in the queue instead. The page reports when it last ran and says plainly when a scan has failed or stalled, because a feed whose whole claim is that it is checked and current must not look healthy when it is neither.
Entries marked official filing work differently: they come from US public disclosure systems - the Federal Election Commission and USAspending.gov - and are reproduced exactly as filed, with named parties and exact figures, so no model is involved in judging them.
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. Write it down before you close the page.
What we keep is its Argon2id hash. A hash only runs one way: it can check a password you type, and it can never be turned back into the password itself. We do not know yours. Nobody who steals the database learns it either.
There is nothing to fall back on. No reset link. No recovery address. No security questions. No second factor. We never asked who you are when you claimed the name, so there is nothing on file that could prove it was yours now.
Treat it like a seed phrase. It is not a lock on the mailbox, it is the only thing that says the mailbox is yours. Whoever holds it is you, as far as the sign in form is concerned. Without it, that form has nothing it will accept.
We cannot look your password up, because we do not have it. There is no copy of it here to find, to hand over, to sell, or to give up under pressure. Not to a stranger, not to someone using your name, not to us.
We cannot restore a lost mailbox to you. Not on request, not for a convincing story, not for proof of anything. There is nothing on file that could tell us the person asking is the person who claimed the name, so there is no version of this where we hand it back and know we handed it to you. Asking gets a straight no.
That rule is not us being difficult. It is the thing keeping your mailbox yours. A service that can let you back in on a good story is a service that can be talked into letting somebody else in on one. We would rather be the kind that cannot be talked into anything.
So nobody is getting in behind you. Not by asking nicely, not by claiming to be you, not by wearing us down. The answer is the same every time, for everyone.
The name stays taken even so, so an address you lock yourself out of is not handed to the next person who asks for it.
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.
What happens when law enforcement asks?
We cooperate, and it gets nobody anywhere. We are not hiding and we do not pretend to sit above the law. Genuine legal process from an official government domain is read and answered, to the extent the law in the Netherlands requires.
The answer never changes, because there is only one answer we have: we hold nothing about you. No account. No name. No email. No phone number. No payment. No IP address filed beside your upload. Not the filename your file had on your own computer. Not a password we could read even if we decided to. There is no drawer here to open, no log to subpoena, no profile to unmask. It was never written down, so it cannot be handed over, leaked, sold, stolen or lost.
That is the entire design, not an accident of it. Any service that can identify the people using it will eventually be made to, by someone with more leverage than they have. So we built one that cannot be made to, because it never knew.
And if that ever changed, we would shut this down instead. The day keeping Anon.Cat alive means starting to log who you are is the day it stops existing: switched off, wiped, replaced with a blank page, no notice and no negotiation. Nobody gets a version of this that informs on the people who trusted it. Not for money, not for pressure, not for an easier life.
We would rather be nothing than be that. And right now, nothing is exactly what we have to give.
Are you looking for partners?
Yes, and only one kind. People building what we are building: privacy that is structural instead of promised, and a flat refusal to decide for anyone what they are allowed to read, host, publish or say.
Hosts, mirrors, tooling, communities, projects that get harder to switch off by standing next to each other. If that is you, write to partner@anon.cat and tell us what you run and what you are protecting. No forms, no pitch deck, no legal name required.
What is not on the table is the thing we are known for. No partnership here comes with user data attached, because there is none to attach, and no amount of money creates some. Anything that would mean logging our users, profiling them, gating them, filtering them or handing them to a third party is refused on sight, whoever is asking and whatever it pays.
Same goals or no deal.
What language should I write to you in?
English. Anything else will not be read. That applies to every address we publish: abuse@anon.cat, info@anon.cat and partner@anon.cat.
The site is translated because you should be able to understand what you are using. Our mail is not: a small team answering machine-translated mail in thirty languages answers nothing accurately, and a takedown or a partnership is the wrong place to guess at what somebody meant. Write it in English, or run it through a translator before you send it. A message in any other language is closed unread, and no reply is sent.
Are there geographic restrictions?
Yes. The following regions cannot upload files:
Upload blocked (can view & download): All of Africa except South Africa, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco • All of South America • Serbia. Users in these regions can still view files, use our email service, access the paste service, and use all other features. They just cannot upload new files.
Completely blocked (no access): Israel, India, and Iran are completely restricted and cannot access the site at all.
These restrictions are in place for regulatory and operational reasons. If you believe you should have access, please contact info@anon.cat.
I have a question...
Email info@anon.cat in English.