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OVH Cloud shuts down Guerrilla Mail

277 points by colesantiago 6y ago

mikehuntisnice 6y ago
What a bunch of cu9ts
notRobot 6y ago
For those who don't know what Guerrilla Mail is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_Mail https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_Mail
- jwilk 6y ago
  Non-mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_Mail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_Mail
  - grishka 6y ago
    Userscript to forget about mobile links forever: // ==UserScript== // @name Redirect from mobile wiki to desktop // @namespace http://tampermonkey.net/ // @version 0.1 // @description try to take over the world! // @author You // @match https://*.m.wikipedia.org/* // @grant none // @run-at document-start // ==/UserScript== window.location.hostname=window.location.hostname.split(".")[0]+".wikipedia.org";
    - sauerbraten 6y ago
      Funny, I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mobile-wikipedia-webextension/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mobile-wikipe... because I generally prefer the mobile site, even on desktop. (Same with Twitter by the way.)
      - t0astbread 6y ago
        If you mean the React-powered mobile.twitter.com, the main site (twitter.com) now points to that as well (since about a year ago).
davesmylie 6y ago
Years back I used to run a similar service (dudmail) which I eventually shutdown due to the time sink (and the unbelievable pain of trying to handle unicode in a million different languages correctly) I was definitely a lot younger and naive back then and whilst I had intended it as mostly a way to avoid site registration email spam, until reading that wiki link I had never really thought of the potential for abuse. I'd have to go back and look but I'm pretty sure it was running on OVH towards towards the end as well.
DoingIsLearning 6y ago
I will admit that after the RIAA/youtube-dl story I felt that it confirmed my belief that it was a mistake for anyone to host anything on US based servers. This takedown with complete lack of transparency from a French provider (OVH) really proves me wrong. Unless this is some extreme security situation/investigation where it was being used for communication between groups I can't really see this holding up in a European Court? As an aside Guerrila Mail/ Shark Lasers was my go to service for that kind of 'subscribe this' throw-away email. Anybody has recommendations for alternatives?
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  This may be unrelated and a coincidence, but: France has a strong and growing body of anti-terrorist legislation, and I believe that some of it prevents providers from discussing some law enforcement notices (I believe that the same also exists in the US, hence some companies disclosing that they have NOT received any such requests. So when they stop saying that, you know what's up).
  - donalhunt 6y ago
    As other commentators have stated, OVH have datacenters in multiple jurisdictions. For example the US and European services are distinct entities and while product offerings are similar there are some specific differences. Also worth noting that while they use support teams across continents, the teams rarely have much context of what's happening in the other continents (has been as issue in the past for my teams). It is unclear which entity was providing the service to Guerrilla Mail.
- tao_oat 6y ago
  10minutemail.com and anonbox.net are both good. If I need a new service, I look at the list of temporary email services supported by the Bloody Vikings Firefox extension [1]. There are quite a few there. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bloody-vikings https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bloody-viking...
  - 6y ago
jjones2 6y ago
This is criminal. How can they do this to us? It was a great service.
dustinmoris 6y ago
Can someone explain why a throw-away email service such as Guerrilla Mail has to go offline as a result of law enforcement? I understand that shady people are doing a lot of shady things with such services, but when equally shady people (criminals, terrorists, pedophiles, etc.) use platforms like Facebook or WhatsApp to commit extremely serious crimes nobody is taking Facebook or WhatsApp offline. What is the rationale behind this?
- a_imho 6y ago
  I guess it is called a double standard.
  - mikehuntisnice 6y ago
    Ask sir William about that
- logronoide 6y ago
  As an old girlfriend told me: “Size matters”. Closing Guerrilla Mail will upset us a lot but the rest of the world will ignore it. Close Whatsapp and the world will be a chaos.
- grishka 6y ago
  For one, Facebook is its own hosting provider. Not only do they have their own servers, they have their own datacenters and networks. There's quite literally no one to take them offline like that.
  - varispeed 6y ago
    It is common that large companies split into subsidiaries dedicated to handle one or a couple of tasks. I wouldn't be surprised if the FB hosting was handled by a separate company owned by FB. Regardless - if there is a request to take something offline, then it should be followed. It is unacceptable that we have two tier legal system. One, very strict for small players, and essentially no rules for the big boys.
ffpip 6y ago
I use them on a weekly basis :( If a site asks a mail, enter random-6-characters@pokemail.net , in 30 seconds, go to guerrillamail.com and enter the same random 6 characters for the verification link, if any. Thanks for helping me avoid spam
- joosters 6y ago
  I've been using mailinator.com for years - they have an almost identical service (they don't allow you to send mail, though) Another helpful use case: Some annoying sites ask you to create an account before you can browse them, but there's a faster way: Click on a 'lost password' link, and enter <website name>@mailinator.com as your email - chances are, someone else has already used mailinator to create an account, and you can re-use theirs :-)
  - karrotwaltz 6y ago
    I use bugmenot for websites that require an account to browse or to download stuff (looking at you Qt), it works most of the time
  - tsjq 6y ago
    many websites do not accept the @mailinator.com email addresses. And Mailinator used to have a ton of alternate domains, nowadays I do not see those. what happened ?
    - Symbiote 6y ago
      You can set your own alternative domain, by setting a DNS MX record: 10 mail.mailinator.com I have this setup for a subdomain ("xyz") of my personal domain.
logronoide 6y ago
Most people in HN use Disposable Email Address services like Guerrilla Mail almost on a daily basis to avoid companies spamming us or even worse: sell our email as PII. But bad actors also use these services to anonymize themselves and not only abuse of legit services, but commit fraudulent activities like extortion, porn revenge, identity theft... and also terrorism. I don’t know why OVH shuts down this service, but knowing in first person how laxe OVH rules are compared to other providers, it must be a serious thing. Probably they found out they could break the law (GDPR?) seriously keeping Guerrilla Mail as a customer.
- dtech 6y ago
  > But bad actors also use these services to anonymize themselves I mean yes, but then you'd also have to shut down Gmail, live.com and all the dozens of free email hosters. Better make prepaid SIM cards illegal too. Oh an letters can be mailed anomalously, better make that illegal too.
  - logronoide 6y ago
    I cannot agree more from the usage point of view. But we have to think how others see them: The difference is about the “business model” of DEA and Freemail providers. It’s easy to justify in a court that the purpose of a Freemail service is to offer email service to individuals and that’s why they ask for PII and acceptance of a ToS. Most of DEA don’t ask for PII to register (if any register at all) and the TOS if exists is against GDPR. In Europe, SIM cards (prepaid or not) must have an owner, so PII is mandatory when buying one. About anonymous letters. Do you know why the snail Mail in some European countries is “Royal Mail”? Because in the past the worst crime in a Kingdom was against the King/Queen. Anonymous mailing could cost you your life because it was a crime against the Royal Crown.
  - kalleboo 6y ago
    Lots of countries require government ID to activate prepaid SIM cards for this reason (including supposedly privacy-conscious countries like Germany) Some countries go further and require government ID to sign up for even stuff like social networks (South Korea) You propose it as a ridiculous conclusion but these are things that democratically-elected governments do.
qz2 6y ago
OVH added to personal shitlist of companies never to go near. Edit: downvotes from OVH I suspect. It's perfectly rational if you read the comments about the abuse team being mostly useless. It's best to judge a company at the point something goes wrong and how it's handled not when it's going right. This is badly handled.
- boudin 6y ago
  We need to have more information to conclude anything. Servers hosting Guerrilla Mail might have been seized for an investigation for example and OVH might have very little choice but to comply. I'm not saying it's great, but the story might have been the same if it was another provider. On the other hand, the location of the server might have a bigger impact as it changes which laws applies.
- 3np 6y ago
  Your comment didn't get downvoted because people disagree or are shilling for OVH, but because it doesn't contribute anything to the conversation. Comments like this tend to get downvoted regardless of sentiment, which I'm surprised you haven't realized yet given your karma. This includes meta-commenting on comment voting. Please refresh the guidelines.
  - qz2 6y ago
    Thank you for the reminder. I will indeed read them again.
02020202 6y ago
i had a vps with ovh before and i am building a new service to launch soon and ovh was on top of my list...so i guess they can fuck the right off. vote with your wallet, as always.
chmod775 6y ago
Not sure what they've been doing, but in my experience the handling of law enforcement requests by OVH is hit and miss. So far they have always forwarded requests to us, but in some cases they shut down some of our servers if we didn't respond within a few hours. This looks like the request was directly addressed to them and they may be legally prohibited from talking about it.
makach 6y ago
I use GuerrillaMail regularly. This is a security tool. There is an absolute need for easy anonymous throwaway email addresses. Hopefully, this will be resolved quickly. Tell us how to help!
- bufferoverflow 6y ago
  It takes like 30 seconds to register a GMail address. I understand it's a bit less convenient, but how often do you need a throwaway email with zero prior use?
  - rndgermandude 6y ago
    No, "please give us your telephone number, you cannot skip this step"
  - imtringued 6y ago
    Pretty much every website requires you to enter an email address to create an account. If you don't trust the site or don't think you are going to use it for more than a trial then if you use your real email address you risk getting spam either through database leaks, because they have signed you up to a bunch of newsletters or because after signing up for a thousand different sites you get privacy policy updates every week.
- knorker 6y ago
  mailinator?
- swiley 6y ago
  You can create throwaway emails pretty easily if you register a domain name, they're not quite anonymous but they're practically the same.
  - rsync 6y ago
    This is correct. I strongly recommend registering a random, throwaway domain and running your own mailserver. Creating an entry in /etc/mail/aliases is just as fast as the interface on the throwaway email sites and you have much more control over the resulting inbound mail.
glokk 6y ago
If they have control over DNS, could they just move to another cloud service?
- abc-xyz 6y ago
  It's still greatly appreciated that they share the information so we know that OVH should be avoided.
mikehuntisnice 6y ago
Got any gleenogs?
mikehuntisnice 6y ago
Who will I use now when I want to spam people
user5994461 6y ago
My bet is guerilla mail was pursued for fraud/terrorism/drug charges, it's not a stretch to guess how an anonymous email service is used by some users. Looking at guerilla mail, there is no way to contact them and no information about who runs the service. It's a shady company with no legal information as far as anyone can tell. (nothing in the about us or the terms or service pages). If the police wanted to investigate some users/mails, they would have to get a warrant to OVH to figure out who to contact in the first place (who runs that thing?). It's a fair guess that OVH receiving anything of that sort would shutdown the account immediately. It's also possible that the police would purposefully shutdown the service and/or seize the servers but rather unlikely. Either way, all the roads lead to the site being dead.
- flashmob 6y ago
  Nowhere on the website it says that it's an anonymous email service provider - it was an anti-spam email solution first and foremost. In fact, the email sending feature prominently warned the user that their IP address would be included in the headers of the email sent. (The sending feature was not for anonymous email, but for the rare chance that a user needed to send an email from there or reply. Guerrilla Mail is mostly used for receiving)
  - user5994461 6y ago
    Well, it allows to send and receive emails, it's going to be abused like an email service, how is up to creativity =) It would certainly be nice to have more information on what exactly happened.
    - flashmob 6y ago
      of course - create any website open to the public where they can message each other, and there will always be some abuse. It's unavoidable. But what can you do? You can't police the messages for every potential form of abuse. (I've only ran an automated spam filter to make sure that the service is never used for blatant spam. I've also blanket-blocked some domains whenever I noticed a pattern in any abuse reports, and finally recipients were able to easily do a permanent block themselves). In any case, running a messaging service even more difficult if you're a small guy and not Facebook or Google. I've added more information about the details of the suspension in another post on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24998922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24998922
johnklos 6y ago
Any service of any importance should be run on hardware you own. There should be nothing even slightly surprising about this. OVH is a shitty company that will let anyone do anything they want until enough complaints are made. They don't communicate. Guerrilla Mail should colocate some servers and/or find a company that is small enough to have humans with whom they can actually communicate.
- patchtopic 6y ago
  A colo company could change the locks or pull the cable if coming under comparable legal pressure. Depending on the colo company? I'm surprised that Guerrilla Mail havent at least put a temporary status web page up on their domain yet though..
richardARPANET 6y ago
We were considering using OVH for a huge upcoming project, not any more.
- Symbiote 6y ago
  For all we know, the police appeared at the door with a suitable warrant to remove the server.
  - richardARPANET 6y ago
    It's clear from the Tweets that OVH didn't communicate properly. Due to that, they're on a blacklist now as far as I'm concerned.
yusyusyus 6y ago
Way back in the day when I worked for some server rental place, we had an AUP and all of that, but an internal policy: if the cops came knocking about your stuff, we were gonna shut it all down. Basic reason is that the effort involved in such an account cost us more money than we made in dealing with it. Easier to just cut the relationship.
getlawgdon 6y ago
Was GM generating revenue?
pwned1 6y ago
I’ve been trying for months to get OVH to take down a phishing site that targets my company and I can’t get any response whatsoever from them.
vanburen 6y ago
Maybe they should look at hosting at 1984.is instead, as they seem to have a more robust policy in place regarding take downs: "Unwavering loyalty to our customers and their fundamental rights is a core value of 1984, hence the name to remind us of what can happen if we fall asleep on our watch. We state that 1984 as a company and its officers will always go the extra mile to protect our customers' civil rights, including the freedom of expression, the freedom of the press, the right to anonymity and privacy. 1984 will always do everything within its legal power to inform our customers of any inquiries from any authorities, lawyers or courts into the customer's affairs that we may become aware of. It is essential that the jurisdiction that the company operates in is Iceland, where the IMMI legislation is forthcoming, making Iceland a haven for freedom of the press and freedom of expression in general." [1] [1]: https://www.1984.is/about/ https://www.1984.is/about/
- zcam 6y ago
  exoscale.com would be a good alternative as well
oron 6y ago
I host my temp mail https://getnada.com https://getnada.com service @ OVH for the last 6-7 years and I hope they don't shut me down like that, They do from time to time send takedown requests to phishing attempts and other criminal activity which we take down ASAP but usually their response team is doing a good job.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  Sounds like this is a good time to have a backup plan, probably getting servers somewhere else and making sure your DNS is hosted by someone else.
flashmob 6y ago
Admin of Guerrilla Mail here. I've been hosting the site on OVH since 2016. The site hasn't changed much during this time, and I've been quite happy with their services until now. A little bit about Guerrilla Mail: It its' first and foremost, an anti-spam solution. Nowhere on the website it says that's an "anonymous email" provider. In fact, the email sending feature prominently warned the user that their IP address would be included in the headers of the email sent. (The sending feature was not for anonymous email, but for the rare chance that a user needed to send an email from there or reply. Guerrilla Mail is mostly used for receiving) The timeline for the suspension went like this: On October 12th, I received what seemed like a canned message from the OVHCloud Abuse team, saying that my server was (quote) "used for a fraudulent activity" and threatening termination within 48 hours. There was no further details about the nature of the "fraudulent activity". I've replied to the message asking to give more details. On October 16, I've received a reply, but still no details about the specific case. They mentioned that, their quote: "the problem here is clearly, that your service is too easy to use for fraudulent and illegal activities. ", further threatening to shut down the service within 7 days "if the situation does not improve". They also suggested a list of measures that the site should take. I've replied informing that most of measures that they suggested were already taken, plus some other measures including an anti-abuse policy that has worked well over the years. On October 19, I received a reply, this time hinting that I should pay them for an additional service, their quote "Maybe you see an option in using a service which lets you customize the Whois-Record, so your contact details can be mentioned for abuse instead of ours.". I've started to deeply consider such a service, but before I would take it up, I wanted to get more info about the alleged law enforcement requests they receive, that are never forwarded, so I've asked them for more information about these once again. On November 2nd, I received a reply, but still no details about the specific case, or the rate of such requests, questions that I've asked previously were ignored. Again, they were offering the additional service, their quote "change of infra to have your own abuse contact in registry info". At this stage I was ready to buy whatever they were offering. I've replied to the email with only two sentences "Is there someone I can speak with directly on your team? Let's do a 30 minute call and reach an understanding." On November 4th, I received a reply notifying that the server has been suspended. Btw, if there's anyone at OVH that wants to look at the issue, it is WTLXFRCVSG.85a1

277 points by colesantiago 6y ago

What a bunch of cu9ts

For those who don't know what Guerrilla Mail is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_Mail https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_Mail

jwilk 6y ago
Non-mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_Mail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_Mail
- grishka 6y ago
  Userscript to forget about mobile links forever: // ==UserScript== // @name Redirect from mobile wiki to desktop // @namespace http://tampermonkey.net/ // @version 0.1 // @description try to take over the world! // @author You // @match https://*.m.wikipedia.org/* // @grant none // @run-at document-start // ==/UserScript== window.location.hostname=window.location.hostname.split(".")[0]+".wikipedia.org";
  - sauerbraten 6y ago
    Funny, I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mobile-wikipedia-webextension/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mobile-wikipe... because I generally prefer the mobile site, even on desktop. (Same with Twitter by the way.)
    - t0astbread 6y ago
      If you mean the React-powered mobile.twitter.com, the main site (twitter.com) now points to that as well (since about a year ago).

davesmylie 6y ago

Years back I used to run a similar service (dudmail) which I eventually shutdown due to the time sink (and the unbelievable pain of trying to handle unicode in a million different languages correctly) I was definitely a lot younger and naive back then and whilst I had intended it as mostly a way to avoid site registration email spam, until reading that wiki link I had never really thought of the potential for abuse. I'd have to go back and look but I'm pretty sure it was running on OVH towards towards the end as well.

DoingIsLearning 6y ago

I will admit that after the RIAA/youtube-dl story I felt that it confirmed my belief that it was a mistake for anyone to host anything on US based servers. This takedown with complete lack of transparency from a French provider (OVH) really proves me wrong. Unless this is some extreme security situation/investigation where it was being used for communication between groups I can't really see this holding up in a European Court? As an aside Guerrila Mail/ Shark Lasers was my go to service for that kind of 'subscribe this' throw-away email. Anybody has recommendations for alternatives?

mytailorisrich 6y ago
This may be unrelated and a coincidence, but: France has a strong and growing body of anti-terrorist legislation, and I believe that some of it prevents providers from discussing some law enforcement notices (I believe that the same also exists in the US, hence some companies disclosing that they have NOT received any such requests. So when they stop saying that, you know what's up).
- donalhunt 6y ago
  As other commentators have stated, OVH have datacenters in multiple jurisdictions. For example the US and European services are distinct entities and while product offerings are similar there are some specific differences. Also worth noting that while they use support teams across continents, the teams rarely have much context of what's happening in the other continents (has been as issue in the past for my teams). It is unclear which entity was providing the service to Guerrilla Mail.
tao_oat 6y ago
10minutemail.com and anonbox.net are both good. If I need a new service, I look at the list of temporary email services supported by the Bloody Vikings Firefox extension [1]. There are quite a few there. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bloody-vikings https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bloody-viking...
- 6y ago

jjones2 6y ago

This is criminal. How can they do this to us? It was a great service.

dustinmoris 6y ago

Can someone explain why a throw-away email service such as Guerrilla Mail has to go offline as a result of law enforcement? I understand that shady people are doing a lot of shady things with such services, but when equally shady people (criminals, terrorists, pedophiles, etc.) use platforms like Facebook or WhatsApp to commit extremely serious crimes nobody is taking Facebook or WhatsApp offline. What is the rationale behind this?

a_imho 6y ago
I guess it is called a double standard.
- mikehuntisnice 6y ago
  Ask sir William about that
logronoide 6y ago
As an old girlfriend told me: “Size matters”. Closing Guerrilla Mail will upset us a lot but the rest of the world will ignore it. Close Whatsapp and the world will be a chaos.
grishka 6y ago
For one, Facebook is its own hosting provider. Not only do they have their own servers, they have their own datacenters and networks. There's quite literally no one to take them offline like that.
- varispeed 6y ago
  It is common that large companies split into subsidiaries dedicated to handle one or a couple of tasks. I wouldn't be surprised if the FB hosting was handled by a separate company owned by FB. Regardless - if there is a request to take something offline, then it should be followed. It is unacceptable that we have two tier legal system. One, very strict for small players, and essentially no rules for the big boys.

ffpip 6y ago

I use them on a weekly basis :( If a site asks a mail, enter random-6-characters@pokemail.net , in 30 seconds, go to guerrillamail.com and enter the same random 6 characters for the verification link, if any. Thanks for helping me avoid spam

joosters 6y ago
I've been using mailinator.com for years - they have an almost identical service (they don't allow you to send mail, though) Another helpful use case: Some annoying sites ask you to create an account before you can browse them, but there's a faster way: Click on a 'lost password' link, and enter <website name>@mailinator.com as your email - chances are, someone else has already used mailinator to create an account, and you can re-use theirs :-)
- karrotwaltz 6y ago
  I use bugmenot for websites that require an account to browse or to download stuff (looking at you Qt), it works most of the time
- tsjq 6y ago
  many websites do not accept the @mailinator.com email addresses. And Mailinator used to have a ton of alternate domains, nowadays I do not see those. what happened ?
  - Symbiote 6y ago
    You can set your own alternative domain, by setting a DNS MX record: 10 mail.mailinator.com I have this setup for a subdomain ("xyz") of my personal domain.

logronoide 6y ago

Most people in HN use Disposable Email Address services like Guerrilla Mail almost on a daily basis to avoid companies spamming us or even worse: sell our email as PII. But bad actors also use these services to anonymize themselves and not only abuse of legit services, but commit fraudulent activities like extortion, porn revenge, identity theft... and also terrorism. I don’t know why OVH shuts down this service, but knowing in first person how laxe OVH rules are compared to other providers, it must be a serious thing. Probably they found out they could break the law (GDPR?) seriously keeping Guerrilla Mail as a customer.

dtech 6y ago
> But bad actors also use these services to anonymize themselves I mean yes, but then you'd also have to shut down Gmail, live.com and all the dozens of free email hosters. Better make prepaid SIM cards illegal too. Oh an letters can be mailed anomalously, better make that illegal too.
- logronoide 6y ago
  I cannot agree more from the usage point of view. But we have to think how others see them: The difference is about the “business model” of DEA and Freemail providers. It’s easy to justify in a court that the purpose of a Freemail service is to offer email service to individuals and that’s why they ask for PII and acceptance of a ToS. Most of DEA don’t ask for PII to register (if any register at all) and the TOS if exists is against GDPR. In Europe, SIM cards (prepaid or not) must have an owner, so PII is mandatory when buying one. About anonymous letters. Do you know why the snail Mail in some European countries is “Royal Mail”? Because in the past the worst crime in a Kingdom was against the King/Queen. Anonymous mailing could cost you your life because it was a crime against the Royal Crown.
- kalleboo 6y ago
  Lots of countries require government ID to activate prepaid SIM cards for this reason (including supposedly privacy-conscious countries like Germany) Some countries go further and require government ID to sign up for even stuff like social networks (South Korea) You propose it as a ridiculous conclusion but these are things that democratically-elected governments do.

qz2 6y ago

OVH added to personal shitlist of companies never to go near. Edit: downvotes from OVH I suspect. It's perfectly rational if you read the comments about the abuse team being mostly useless. It's best to judge a company at the point something goes wrong and how it's handled not when it's going right. This is badly handled.

boudin 6y ago
We need to have more information to conclude anything. Servers hosting Guerrilla Mail might have been seized for an investigation for example and OVH might have very little choice but to comply. I'm not saying it's great, but the story might have been the same if it was another provider. On the other hand, the location of the server might have a bigger impact as it changes which laws applies.
3np 6y ago
Your comment didn't get downvoted because people disagree or are shilling for OVH, but because it doesn't contribute anything to the conversation. Comments like this tend to get downvoted regardless of sentiment, which I'm surprised you haven't realized yet given your karma. This includes meta-commenting on comment voting. Please refresh the guidelines.
- qz2 6y ago
  Thank you for the reminder. I will indeed read them again.

02020202 6y ago

i had a vps with ovh before and i am building a new service to launch soon and ovh was on top of my list...so i guess they can fuck the right off. vote with your wallet, as always.

chmod775 6y ago

Not sure what they've been doing, but in my experience the handling of law enforcement requests by OVH is hit and miss. So far they have always forwarded requests to us, but in some cases they shut down some of our servers if we didn't respond within a few hours. This looks like the request was directly addressed to them and they may be legally prohibited from talking about it.

makach 6y ago

I use GuerrillaMail regularly. This is a security tool. There is an absolute need for easy anonymous throwaway email addresses. Hopefully, this will be resolved quickly. Tell us how to help!

bufferoverflow 6y ago
It takes like 30 seconds to register a GMail address. I understand it's a bit less convenient, but how often do you need a throwaway email with zero prior use?
- rndgermandude 6y ago
  No, "please give us your telephone number, you cannot skip this step"
- imtringued 6y ago
  Pretty much every website requires you to enter an email address to create an account. If you don't trust the site or don't think you are going to use it for more than a trial then if you use your real email address you risk getting spam either through database leaks, because they have signed you up to a bunch of newsletters or because after signing up for a thousand different sites you get privacy policy updates every week.
knorker 6y ago
mailinator?
swiley 6y ago
You can create throwaway emails pretty easily if you register a domain name, they're not quite anonymous but they're practically the same.
- rsync 6y ago
  This is correct. I strongly recommend registering a random, throwaway domain and running your own mailserver. Creating an entry in /etc/mail/aliases is just as fast as the interface on the throwaway email sites and you have much more control over the resulting inbound mail.

glokk 6y ago

If they have control over DNS, could they just move to another cloud service?

abc-xyz 6y ago
It's still greatly appreciated that they share the information so we know that OVH should be avoided.

mikehuntisnice 6y ago

Got any gleenogs?

mikehuntisnice 6y ago

Who will I use now when I want to spam people

user5994461 6y ago

My bet is guerilla mail was pursued for fraud/terrorism/drug charges, it's not a stretch to guess how an anonymous email service is used by some users. Looking at guerilla mail, there is no way to contact them and no information about who runs the service. It's a shady company with no legal information as far as anyone can tell. (nothing in the about us or the terms or service pages). If the police wanted to investigate some users/mails, they would have to get a warrant to OVH to figure out who to contact in the first place (who runs that thing?). It's a fair guess that OVH receiving anything of that sort would shutdown the account immediately. It's also possible that the police would purposefully shutdown the service and/or seize the servers but rather unlikely. Either way, all the roads lead to the site being dead.

flashmob 6y ago
Nowhere on the website it says that it's an anonymous email service provider - it was an anti-spam email solution first and foremost. In fact, the email sending feature prominently warned the user that their IP address would be included in the headers of the email sent. (The sending feature was not for anonymous email, but for the rare chance that a user needed to send an email from there or reply. Guerrilla Mail is mostly used for receiving)
- user5994461 6y ago
  Well, it allows to send and receive emails, it's going to be abused like an email service, how is up to creativity =) It would certainly be nice to have more information on what exactly happened.
  - flashmob 6y ago
    of course - create any website open to the public where they can message each other, and there will always be some abuse. It's unavoidable. But what can you do? You can't police the messages for every potential form of abuse. (I've only ran an automated spam filter to make sure that the service is never used for blatant spam. I've also blanket-blocked some domains whenever I noticed a pattern in any abuse reports, and finally recipients were able to easily do a permanent block themselves). In any case, running a messaging service even more difficult if you're a small guy and not Facebook or Google. I've added more information about the details of the suspension in another post on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24998922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24998922

johnklos 6y ago

Any service of any importance should be run on hardware you own. There should be nothing even slightly surprising about this. OVH is a shitty company that will let anyone do anything they want until enough complaints are made. They don't communicate. Guerrilla Mail should colocate some servers and/or find a company that is small enough to have humans with whom they can actually communicate.

patchtopic 6y ago
A colo company could change the locks or pull the cable if coming under comparable legal pressure. Depending on the colo company? I'm surprised that Guerrilla Mail havent at least put a temporary status web page up on their domain yet though..

richardARPANET 6y ago

We were considering using OVH for a huge upcoming project, not any more.

Symbiote 6y ago
For all we know, the police appeared at the door with a suitable warrant to remove the server.
- richardARPANET 6y ago
  It's clear from the Tweets that OVH didn't communicate properly. Due to that, they're on a blacklist now as far as I'm concerned.

yusyusyus 6y ago

Way back in the day when I worked for some server rental place, we had an AUP and all of that, but an internal policy: if the cops came knocking about your stuff, we were gonna shut it all down. Basic reason is that the effort involved in such an account cost us more money than we made in dealing with it. Easier to just cut the relationship.

getlawgdon 6y ago

Was GM generating revenue?

pwned1 6y ago

I’ve been trying for months to get OVH to take down a phishing site that targets my company and I can’t get any response whatsoever from them.

vanburen 6y ago

Maybe they should look at hosting at 1984.is instead, as they seem to have a more robust policy in place regarding take downs: "Unwavering loyalty to our customers and their fundamental rights is a core value of 1984, hence the name to remind us of what can happen if we fall asleep on our watch. We state that 1984 as a company and its officers will always go the extra mile to protect our customers' civil rights, including the freedom of expression, the freedom of the press, the right to anonymity and privacy. 1984 will always do everything within its legal power to inform our customers of any inquiries from any authorities, lawyers or courts into the customer's affairs that we may become aware of. It is essential that the jurisdiction that the company operates in is Iceland, where the IMMI legislation is forthcoming, making Iceland a haven for freedom of the press and freedom of expression in general." [1] [1]: https://www.1984.is/about/ https://www.1984.is/about/

zcam 6y ago
exoscale.com would be a good alternative as well

oron 6y ago

I host my temp mail https://getnada.com https://getnada.com service @ OVH for the last 6-7 years and I hope they don't shut me down like that, They do from time to time send takedown requests to phishing attempts and other criminal activity which we take down ASAP but usually their response team is doing a good job.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
Sounds like this is a good time to have a backup plan, probably getting servers somewhere else and making sure your DNS is hosted by someone else.

flashmob 6y ago

Admin of Guerrilla Mail here. I've been hosting the site on OVH since 2016. The site hasn't changed much during this time, and I've been quite happy with their services until now. A little bit about Guerrilla Mail: It its' first and foremost, an anti-spam solution. Nowhere on the website it says that's an "anonymous email" provider. In fact, the email sending feature prominently warned the user that their IP address would be included in the headers of the email sent. (The sending feature was not for anonymous email, but for the rare chance that a user needed to send an email from there or reply. Guerrilla Mail is mostly used for receiving) The timeline for the suspension went like this: On October 12th, I received what seemed like a canned message from the OVHCloud Abuse team, saying that my server was (quote) "used for a fraudulent activity" and threatening termination within 48 hours. There was no further details about the nature of the "fraudulent activity". I've replied to the message asking to give more details. On October 16, I've received a reply, but still no details about the specific case. They mentioned that, their quote: "the problem here is clearly, that your service is too easy to use for fraudulent and illegal activities. ", further threatening to shut down the service within 7 days "if the situation does not improve". They also suggested a list of measures that the site should take. I've replied informing that most of measures that they suggested were already taken, plus some other measures including an anti-abuse policy that has worked well over the years. On October 19, I received a reply, this time hinting that I should pay them for an additional service, their quote "Maybe you see an option in using a service which lets you customize the Whois-Record, so your contact details can be mentioned for abuse instead of ours.". I've started to deeply consider such a service, but before I would take it up, I wanted to get more info about the alleged law enforcement requests they receive, that are never forwarded, so I've asked them for more information about these once again. On November 2nd, I received a reply, but still no details about the specific case, or the rate of such requests, questions that I've asked previously were ignored. Again, they were offering the additional service, their quote "change of infra to have your own abuse contact in registry info". At this stage I was ready to buy whatever they were offering. I've replied to the email with only two sentences "Is there someone I can speak with directly on your team? Let's do a 30 minute call and reach an understanding." On November 4th, I received a reply notifying that the server has been suspended. Btw, if there's anyone at OVH that wants to look at the issue, it is WTLXFRCVSG.85a1