Domain registrar Gandi gets bought out, removes free mailboxes
social.afront.org
social.afront.org
So, further to recent changes at Gandi, I've just got some more info from support which I've included below. I've purchased domains from Gandi, pre-paying for multiple years of service such that some domains I have don't need renewing until 2027. When I purchased that service the offer was inclusive of 2 mailboxes for the duration of the contract, and now they're planning to remove those inclusive mailboxes and start charging me extra for them from next month.
To me, this sounds like a planned and fully intentional breach of contract.
"We'll start charging for mailboxes from next month. Our current mail offer will end and will be replaced by our new offer: [...]
What’s going to happen going forward ?
Starting from April 6th, you will have the choice to either : - Keep your mailbox and pay accordingly on a monthly basis. - Refuse the offer and you can have the choice to delete the mailbox or migrate your mailbox to another provider. In that case you will have a two months window to migrate before the deletion of your mailbox - Forwarding address remains free
How ? - You will receive ln the 6th of April a mail with a link to make your choice.
How much it will cost for me ? - It will depend on how many active mailboxes you own. A mailbox costs £2,99 so if you have 2 mailboxes, you will be billed £5,98 monthly."
Domains
We remain committed to offering you the largest portfolio of TLDs,
customized TLD suggestions and best-in-class anycast-level primary
DNS servers. In addition, we will step-up our effort to unburden you
by introducing new managed features:
Advanced and easy to use account security
Proactive notifications on changes and important events
Better rights management
Easier domain transfers with continuity of service
Best-in-class anycast-level secondary DNS servers
You can find the associated new pricing for your domains here[0].
Annoyingly my previous registrar raised prices last year and I thought that, hey, I'll pay a few quid extra and support Gandi as they generally have a decent reputation. Now with this move I'm the fool!
Like others in this thread I've moved to Porkbun, the .com renewals are now about £8.50 and .uk about £5.50 which is much more reasonable and much closer to their cost price.
I'd like my registrar to make a reasonable amount of profit to make staying in business worthwhile but that doesn't make sense when the registrar wants to double or triple the pricing for their bottom line.
Shame, but there we go.
[0] https://www.gandi.net/static/documents/2023-march-gbp-renew-...
Porkbun do .uk domains now? TIL!
I moved some domains from Gandi to Porkbun before as part of a plan to ditch Gandi and when I asked (almost 3 years ago to the day), they didn't support .uk.
Ditto. Moved 11 domains from Gandi to Porkbun today. But... for the lot of them, Porkbun was only $9 more than Cloudflare, which charges straight wholesale prices and takes no profit.
I'm glad Porkbun isn't gouging, but less than $1/domain/year markup still feels a bit thin and leaves me worried that I'll be doing this dance again in a few years.
Same thing with people saying "I trust company X with my data." Do you also trust the next 4 CEOs and the next 10 governments who will have authority over them?
Now with this move I have no reason left to pay extra, I'll renew somewhere else.
I'm a bit upset that I learn about this on HN too, I wonder when I'll get an email. They didn't even update their own website yet.
Domains are the keys to the internet atm, it would be nice to see someone take it seriously.
Edit: I guess I'll try realtimeregister, since I haven't seen anything negative and they support U2F per Yubikey's catalog.
Edit2: Cool, cool, when you sign up they assign you a non-random password which anyone can use to log in and view your personal information.
Edit3: Others with u2f support that aren't MAMAA: Cloudflare (close), OVH, DNSimple (accounts are $60/year)
Just in case you did not know: if you transfer to a different registrar, you will not lose the extra years of registration. You can confirm the expected expiration date of 2027 at lookup.icann.org.
I did not know that. But how do you do it? And where to find a list of reputable registrars (which seems the rarest of species)?
https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/116j7iq/fyi_namech...
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/namecheaps-em...
Maybe I'm not paranoid enough, but I think there would be too much noise if every company blasted out emails to all customers any time there was ANY security failure, including failures that do not expose customer data... Sure, they should follow up on your who got phishing emails, but I don't see a need to email every customer.
I've had no issues with NameCheap, but I just register domains, no other fancy services.
I currently use porkbun and namesilo with very few issues so far (about 3 years). You will need to unlock your domain and get an authorization code (EPP Key) from Gandi and then go to your new registrar and select Transfer Domain. Its fairly straight forward.
What happened that drove you away?
For me the purpose of a registrar is to register a domain. Porkbun might have other capabilities, but for this purpose it was wonderfully singleminded for me.
1. They routinely fail to auto renew domains despite correct billing details and auto renew being on (I lost some domains to this).
2. They support premium domains, so you can be struck by lightning and randomly have the price of your domains dramatically jacked up (had to drop a domain due to this).
3. The name (NameCheap) no longer checks out, they are not cheap anymore.
They stopped being good about 2 years ago.
Do you have an example of this as it is against ICANN's rules IIRC.
The only instances I have seen about this were the posts here on HN when someone didn't read the registration price being at a discount compared to the renewal price thereafter.
If there is of course a legitimate instance of reclassification into a premium domain after the fact, you have a big case on your hands.
But I remember that I specifically spent effort/time to pick a name that was not marked as premium and double/triple checked before registering. Then about 3 months after I had registered it, it all of a sudden showed as premium in my account.
From my perspective it doesn't really matter much if they made it premium after I had registered it or if it was always premium and they hid that fact and gave me an invisible discount. The end result is the same.
Any registrar that receives the transfer will automatically have the extended expiration date. (The expiration date is actually tracked at the registry.)
For reputable registrars, I think you could gather a list from HN comments and then "do your own research" to whittle down the list.
CF has the most serious product out of any of them, and they sell domains at-cost as a loss-leader to get you in.
> "Gandi SAS (“Gandi”) and Total Webhosting Solutions B.V. (“TWS”), today announced"
when was "today"?
My company has domains registered with Versio (and PCExtreme and Neostrada), but the control panel was showing multiple domains wrongly flagged as 'processing', and actually getting through to customer service takes the better part of day by now. I'm not looking forward to our domains getting migrated due to these mergers.
Start looking for alternative registrars if your domains are hosted by Versio, Neostrada, or PCExtreme! The competent staff of PCExtreme and Neostrada seem to have evaporated in these mergers.
at least, that is my experience
So at least don't get a VPS unless you're ready to give ID, heh.
For less common ccTLDs, Gandi is still hard to beat since they support virtually everything. Apart from that, I have no regrets moving... I saw the writing on the wall about 2 years ago and moved virtually all my domains away from them.
Neither of these meets the European criterion.
TransIP is not exactly the cheapest, but they work fine. Vimexx (which is under the same company as TransIP) is cheaper (closer to pre-TWS Versio pricing), but I'm a bit hesitant to trust a 'budget' registrar again.
If she did not sue Valentin Lacambre, he would not have abandoned altern.org.
If he kept altern.org, gandi would have been an association, not a corporation.
And the world would be a slightly better place.
(btw, it was Estelle Halliday, not Laetitia Halliday. But your uchrony is perfectly right)
Trivia time: Laeticia (née Laetitia) was married to Johnny, the famous French rock singer; Estelle was married to David, son of Johnny. Note that Johnny is dead now, Laeticia has been remaried twice but kept Johnny's last name, Estelle is divorced, and David is not the son of Laeticia as Johnny got married several times (David's mother is the French actress Sylvie Vartan).
(for those also out of the loop: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altern )
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
http://www.gandi.net/static/contracts/en/g2/pdf/MSA-1.3-EN.p... (note that new versions seem to not have the clauses anymore..)
I wonder if that history has something to do with that...
Valentin Lacambre hosted a website where you could post stuff
Estelle Halliday was revenge-porned by someone who posted on this website
French courts ruled that the host was liable (this was back in the day)
Valentin settled and shut down his site and started Gandi
Transfer the domains over to a better more secure registrar. Then set up a server or vps and set up as many mailboxes or emails that you need.
registrar or DNS gets hacked -> attacker can receive mail as you (by transferring your domain or changing your MX record)
e-mail host gets hacked -> attacker can download your inbox
both -> both
The problem is that most domain registrars won't help get your domain name back. Many domains are stolen because they hacked the email address and not the domain registrar account (even though that's how they got access). Most domain registrars don't care at all, and won't help. And there are no current ICANN policies for dealing with stolen domain names. Even UDRP is not set up for dealing with stolen domains. Although we were successful getting one back via UDRP since the business was using the domain previously and we ended up claiming 'commonlaw trademark'.
This is one reason why we've been so successful getting stolen domain names back for clients: we use some alternative methods, such as actually talking to people at the registrars involved and talking with the domain thief, to get domains back.
Don't leave us hanging like that! Which are the registrars that do care, and will help then? Even if they cost more.
Using bundled services from your domain registrar is especially problematic though, because when you switch registrars, you usually lose those bundled services, even though you already paid for them. Often, there's similar services available at the new registrar, but there's a cost to switch, and it's much more difficult to switch because the service provisioning is often tied to the domain process; service at registrar B won't be online until the domain is moved, and service at registrar A may be turned off immediately after the domain is moved, so you have no way to make an orderly transition.
The point is that a single vendor for everything can ruin your life.
Having a good plan for scaling is absolutely a great move. Changing fundamental architecture later isn't easy. Implementing it all immediately however ..
Maybe they have fixed that (I don't see it on their site any more) but I have a screen shot of the old contract provision and I complained to them about it in 2017, and they ignored the complaint.
I'm not sure that gandi's email fits that purpose, but specifically for email it can be a bit more tricky to roll your own than things like HTTPS, so having a hosted solution to handle that can help.
Its not worth £3 a month per box when previously the Gandi markup was £4 a year or so for the extra services on top of the raw domain price.
I'd be more than happy to pay for their service in general, just not under duress. If they'd have given me 6 months to onboard I'd have been perfectly fine with $3/mo for email. If I'm going to be abused with a false sense of urgency and pushed to make a quick decision, I'll just leave.
Probably not worth paying the asking price for this usage though.
This avoided my ISP's block on outbound TCP port 25, and it also gave me a reputable sending IP address economically.
The email I received is slightly different and doesn't include set dates, it just says "after the first year" which could be tomorrow.
I've emailed them asking for clarification.
I pay for Fastmail, but use several of the gandi basic mailboxes for other reasons. I could live with those disappearing. I hope this doesn't also remove the 'forwarded addresses' though.
There’s nothing stopping you from paying for service with a DNS provider for a domain you don’t own, but nobody will actually query those nameservers for your domain, so it doesn’t matter.
To bring it back on topic, this made it easy when I switched service A from Gandi to something else a year or two ago because a few things I was seeing from them "smelled funny." I don't remember the details, just that I wanted to switch.
Anyways, if you don't have a specific reason to pick any specific nameserver go with the easiest one or if you want to have the most features and portability go with Cloudflare.
Even run a dyndns script to have a subdomain for my wireguard connections to home.
Choices of convenience will always be waiting in the future.
Choosing a path that is not the most convenient (just slightly less) can go a long way.
Wherever you register a domain, make sure you practice transferring a domain in, and then out well in advance of ever needing it.
In a functioning society you can’t sell someone a year worth of prepaid car washes and then decide they need to start paying you again 3 months into your contract.
Will be interesting to see if this touches the courts and, if so, how it plays out.
In the ideal fantasy world, contracts are supposed to be "meeting of the minds" between parties of equal power and benefitting parties equally. But when I think of "contract" today, I immediately think "weapon used by a company to beat up a consumer".
100% this
This view is unsupported by the facts in all competent jurisdictions. It’s a convenient one, however, for certain people to spread.
https://californialawreview.org/print/unconscionability-as-a...
From a non-professional prospective, one of the problems with unconscionability is that even terms that are blatantly opposite to prevailing law are highly misleading. This further disenfranchises individuals from the legal system, obscuring our rights even further. I'd personally like to see blatant examples of such start getting policed as something akin to giving improper legal advice.
I've had great success this way against United Airlines, Toyota, and other bigs.
That may be a new record.
Company A never buys company B to let it do its thing.
Or a ship in Arizona to sell you.
GP and others who believe that should google "our incredible journey" - and look at multiple hits, not just the first few. It has become a meme by now.
If you want to be dishonest but not explicitly lie, there are almost always ways to do it. For example, "I believe access to healthcare is a human right" to a normal person sounds like the person is saying that healthcare is a human right, but "access" can mean anything at all and in reality they are saying nothing.
I would not be surprised at all to find that similar inconspicuous weasel words were used.
Perhaps the title should indicate that Gandi is rugpulling email accounts from people who have prepaid for domain registrations.
They haven't told me I'm losing my mailbox yet but I'm on the lookout.
The free mailbox was honestly one of the biggest reasons I chose Gandi, and I would not mind paying for it at all - preferably not under duress though!
I have been a Gandi customer for 5+ years, and I have bought domains til 2026, and I rely on their free email. But I haven't received any communication about changes in pricing.
Haven't heard any communication from Gandi yet but maybe I can update here if/when it happens.
I have a feeling Gandi is going to go down the tubes very fast.
I managed to grab a screenshot earlier: https://imgur.com/a/JB4xpPs
Is it true?
https://www.crunchbase.com/acquisition/montefiore-investment...
If that's the case I'm surprised it took 4 years for me to hear anything about it turning shitty
It's a bummer if Gandi goes downhill. I've never used them personally but I heard a lot of recommendations that they were a good registrar.
They've supported FIDO for a while IIRC.
I had just begun moving to Gandi, now I feel like I shouldn’t move anything more there :/
This is going to burn all of their goodwill they accumulated with the "no bullshit" slogan. I will be swiftly moving all my domains, likely to Porkbun.
A boring company who does 1 thing and does it so well that people dont say good or bad, it's so boring they barely notice it because it gets out the way.
I've been using Gandi for over a decade.
EDIT: Just like I said, in the original thread they are talking about Ghandi screwing customers on email inboxes. Follows my rule of "anything outside of domains and the bs starts".
That’s the Unix philosophy applied to service providers.
The same logic applies to why you should have a separate cable modem and WiFi router.
> If you just buy a domain, you could go to place like GoDaddy and probably have a decent experience.
No GoDaddy sucks even as just a registrar because even configuring NS records to host your DNS elsewhere is a terrible UX.
Wow. Just wow. What happens if I register a domain via Cloudflare but decide later I don't want to use their DNS offerings?
Fast and cheap.
They are just as cheap as the often-mentioned NameCheap, but a much better UI.
Dynadot also lets you "domain taste" that is get a refund in credit if you change your mind after buying a domain within I think 72 hours.
They also are one of the largest domain registrars.
https://your.online/press-release/
The story on Mastodon is that they are axing free mail boxes that you'd get with every domain registered at Gandi, even if you had paid several years up front.
EDIT: It works briefly every 5 or 10 minutes, until it gets rate limited again.
Mirror: https://archive.is/w3yZy
Gandi obviously has issues, but is the thing about email real? Are there _any_ sources that can confirm it?
I've been super lazy and use Route53 for everything right now.
> AWS currently provides Domain Name Registration Services through Gandi SAS , Mesh Digital Limited, Amazon Registrar, Inc., and other ICANN-accredited registrars
> AWS provides the Domain Name Registration Services through ICANN-accredited registrars. AWS currently provides Domain Name Registration Services through Gandi SAS , Mesh Digital Limited, Amazon Registrar, Inc., and other ICANN-accredited registrars (the “Registrar”), and your use of the Domain Name Registration Services is subject to their terms. You can identify the Registrar of record for any Registered Name by performing a WHOIS query here . AWS reserves the right to use any ICANN-accredited registrar as the Registrar.
https://aws.amazon.com/route53/domain-registration-agreement...
They can take years to add new TLDs (I've been waiting for 5+ years for them to do .nz properly). Checkout the support forum. Lots of:
* Someone asks for a new TLD
* Quick reply saying request forwarded to team
* a year passes
* Another person asks when that TLD will become available.
ycombinator.com itself is on 81 "Gandi SAS", although they use AWS DNS, so chances are it's through Route53 (since AWS isn't an ICANN registrar, they have other registrars actually handle the registry ops)
Also note that Gandi also handle registry ops for AWS see https://aws.amazon.com/route53/domain-registration-agreement...
6.1 Nameservers. Registrant agrees to use Cloudflare’s nameservers. REGISTRANT ACKNOWLEDGES AND AGREES THAT IT MAY NOT CHANGE THE NAMESERVERS ON THE REGISTRAR SERVICES, AND THAT IT MUST TRANSFER TO A THIRD PARTY REGISTRAR IF IT WISHES TO CHANGE NAMESERVERS.
Most dot-com era web companies used Network Solutions back in the day - and many still use them. However, DNS updates sometimes take hours, their interface is cumbersome, etc.
It's become quite common to use someone like Cloudflare for Nameserver/DNS duties (among other things) and keep your registrar where you like.
They are just as cheap as the often-mentioned NameCheap, but a much better UI.
Dynadot also lets you "domain taste" that is get a refund in credit if you change your mind after buying a domain within I think 72 hours.
They also are one of the largest domain registrars.
It costs me about $40/year for domain (.org), dns, backup MX/mail spool, and a couple of other bits and pieces. It's been well worth it for the piece of mind.
Personally I'm currently using Sav and Porkbun, with good experiences with Namesilo in the recent past.
Definitely avoid them, and if your domains are important then migrate them elsewhere.
Several reports of problems, including from me:
* https://twitter.com/densone/status/1625378937047027719
(Btw, I don't have a Twitter, so good luck with that. :))
Let me guess, you work for Hover or used to?
Or maybe you just needed more coffee/sleep/something before replying? ;)
I have 4 domains, each with 2 email addresses. I do not want a 287.04 per year bill, and nor do I want my domains being held hostage for this. I will look to migrate away immediately.
But, I have emailed Gandi to ask them to confirm, since the website doesn't yet reflect this news, and it's not the first time they may be victim of disinformation (action perhaps indicitative of trust built using Gandi).
#small, non wholesale customers.
FTR: I have 20+ domains at Gandi and never used their mail service (I run my own e-mail Server for all those domains since many years) so this change does not affect me.
their response
`My bad. I assume the mail you sent was after reading a communication made for clients paying in £. You're not impacted by this communication.
We’re currently reviewing our general conditions and pricing policy in each currency given the fluctuation for the latter which means changes won’t likely be the same for each currency.
Should a change occur for you; you'll receive a mail from us.`
I asked them to confirm the free email isnt being removed for US customers yet, and if it does a email will be sent out.
their reply
`I can only confirm what I shared with you above.`
Additionally, the price per email is going up massively:
Standard: 0.31 GBP -> 2.99 GBP (964%)
Premium: 1.57 GBP -> 5.99 GBP (381%)I specifically need support for .li domains and acme.sh to renew certificates.
Does something exist out there which is equivalent to a domain name for a website (or an any entity) which is independent of a external entities, like DNS or DNS like servers.
I know that in some sense public/private keys in asymmetric cryptography mimic that feature (the public key being the address of the receiver), but is there anything out of the box? Does Tor have a similar feature?
I do understand that this equivalent to which I'm alluding to, may be an unintelligible string of characters, unlike current website user friendly names. I also understand that the underlying ip address change can be a challenge , but probably not an insurmountable one.
purl-dot-org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_uniform_resource_lo...
or
.onion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.onion
e.g. http://p53lf57qovyuvwsc6xnrppyply3vtqm7l6pcobkmyqsiofyeznfu5... will be up even if the propublica.org domain is broken / disabled.
When you type a .onion address into your Tor browser, unlike with a regular domain, you are not looking up an IP address on a DNS server. Instead, you are asking a Hidden Service directory, which anybody can volunteer to run.
Would be really upset if they start charging for the two included mailboxes.
Meh. The specifics here seem pretty damning, though. Most likely the new owners just didn't understand the older contracts and started rolling out the new business model without review. The end result will probably be just a refund for the affected accounts.
This is about them changing the pricing of their service. The part about doing it to customers who have paid in advance may be fraud, but it's still miles better then google randomly locking you out of your account without recourse. You don't have to use Gandi for your email (why would you even except for it being "free" which you now have learned it is not) and you can transfer your domain to another registrar.
Any alternatives I can use? Ideally actual SMTP and not some API, some apps I use only support the SMTP protocol.
The one time many years ago I had to call support for a question a human being answered in 2 rings.
Tucows (which owns Hover) has been around for 30 years. It's likely they'll be around for a long while still.
Just recently I moved a .pn domain (required gandi corporate subscription) to Gandi and they’ll charge me almost double of the at-cost for renewal as the base fee, excluding the corporate subscription. Inquired about this and asked for a refund because I wasn’t satisfied with the service, but that sadly wasn’t granted to me either
What happened to Gandi - No bullsh*t?
it was almost entirely transposed into UK law
https://www.gandi.net/en-US/domain
> Two, free custom email addresses
https://docs.gandi.net/en/gandimail/index.html
> With every domain name you buy from Gandi you receive two free email inboxes through Gandi’s email service, each with 3GB of storage.
Is it an idea to join efforts & money and rent a VPS from Hetzner and run our own mail server?
First you need an un-tainted ip-address/network. Then you need to get it all right with spf, dkim, dmarc, dane etc. One mistake or misconfiguration and emails from your server will at best end up in the junk folder.
Not to mention the server maintenance.
Even if you think you got it all done, you will not be welcome at all recipients (I'm looking at you Microsoft).
It's quite a pain, but I still keep at it because I have the interest and time.
netim replied within 30 minutes of me opening a ticket related to the same issue for context.
It looks like they don't like to be coy about scamming their users either
It sucks how quickly these things can change.
The process is free as in gandi won’t charge you to migrate but newer registar might , and also if you DNS or other services the new service provider will likely charge for those.
[1] for .come .net .org and many other popular ones it is, however for some of newer Top level domains (TLD) they may have only one domain registrar and you cannot move. .dev is owned and operated by google alone.
Gandi afaik does not have exclusive access to any significant TLD so it shouldn’t be a problem
The new registrar will charge a fee and the expiration date of your domain will increase by one year. The transfer fee should be roughly the same as the registration and renewal fees. If anything looks fishy, compare with another registrar (starting with common registrar recommendations you see at HN)
Contrary to the other reply, I do NOT recommend calling and doing it over the phone, as in my opinion that will just be slower and prone to accidents by adding a human into an otherwise automated process.
Once you renew the domain, there is an immediate 60-day (?) period when you cannot transfer the domain elsewhere. So you’d have to wait for that duration and then transfer. You won’t lose out on the expiration date though.
When you transfer the domain to another registrar, you’d have to pay a one year renewal fee, which will extend the ownership of your domain by one more year than what it was before.
It sounds like your domain name entered the redemption period. The high fee to restore a domain in the redemption period is mandated by the registry, not the registrar. So Gandi is not price gouging; they are required to collect that fee for restoring the domain.
TFA 404’s, gandi.net still advertises the two free mailboxes, and I haven’t received any communication from Gandi.
> "What hasn’t changed over the last 20 years is our commitment to serving you, and we will continue doing that every day. In order to serve you in the best way in the future, we are announcing changes to our pricing policy effective April 6th 2023. [...] To ensure we can maintain the highest standards in the future we will stop free mailboxes beyond the first year, and price it at £2.99 per month for standard mailboxes and £5.99 per month for premium mailboxes and we will expand the e-mail offering with [...] Better anti-spam and anti-virus protection"
(Which I'm sure has nothing to do with the uptick in spam I've been receiving the past month or so).
RIP Gandi
Anyone hosting with runbox.com? What can you tell me about it?
Just not sure I can give that up!