Domain registrar Gandi gets bought out, removes free mailboxes

Full message for others not seeing the page:<p>So, further to recent changes at Gandi, I&#x27;ve just got some more info from support which I&#x27;ve included below. I&#x27;ve purchased domains from Gandi, pre-paying for multiple years of service such that some domains I have don&#x27;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&#x27;re planning to remove those inclusive mailboxes and start charging me extra for them from next month.<p>To me, this sounds like a planned and fully intentional breach of contract.<p>&quot;We&#x27;ll start charging for mailboxes from next month. Our current mail offer will end and will be replaced by our new offer: [...]<p>What’s going to happen going forward ?<p>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<p>How ? - You will receive ln the 6th of April a mail with a link to make your choice.<p>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.&quot;

As some comments have mentioned the pricing will increase for domain names too, not very explicit in their email on Tuesday evening &quot;Gandi.net - Update&quot;:<p><pre><code> 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]. </code></pre> Renewing a .com at these new prices is now £24 per year inclusive of tax and .uk domains £12.<p>Annoyingly my previous registrar raised prices last year and I thought that, hey, I&#x27;ll pay a few quid extra and support Gandi as they generally have a decent reputation. Now with this move I&#x27;m the fool!<p>Like others in this thread I&#x27;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.<p>I&#x27;d like my registrar to make a reasonable amount of profit to make staying in business worthwhile but that doesn&#x27;t make sense when the registrar wants to double or triple the pricing for their bottom line.<p>Shame, but there we go.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gandi.net&#x2F;static&#x2F;documents&#x2F;2023-march-gbp-renew-price-increase.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gandi.net&#x2F;static&#x2F;documents&#x2F;2023-march-gbp-renew-...</a>

&gt; I&#x27;ve purchased domains from Gandi, pre-paying for multiple years of service such that some domains I have don&#x27;t need renewing until 2027.<p>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.

For those curious about what&#x27;s going on (the post was removed) they merged with TWS: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;your.online&#x2F;press-release&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;your.online&#x2F;press-release&#x2F;</a>

Thus is all the fault of Laetitia Halliday, ultimately.<p>If she did not sue Valentin Lacambre, he would not have abandoned altern.org.<p>If he kept altern.org, gandi would have been an association, not a corporation.<p>And the world would be a slightly better place.

It sound like they’re hosting at the same place (gandi) where they registered the domain. This is absolutely never recommended, for security purposes. If someone gains access to your hosting account you’ll likely lose all your domain names.<p>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.

Gandi email has been useless from the start. They say right in the contract that they don&#x27;t back up their email servers. Isn&#x27;t the host handling chores like backup part of the point of a hosted product? Of course you can and should distrust the host&#x27;s backups and have your own in addition, but that&#x27;s way different than the host not doing them in the first place.<p>Maybe they have fixed that (I don&#x27;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.

This is really frustrating. I&#x27;m only a small customer but it doesn&#x27;t seem right that they could take away part of the deal if I have multiple years pre-bought prior to the change.<p>The email I received is slightly different and doesn&#x27;t include set dates, it just says &quot;after the first year&quot; which could be tomorrow.<p>I&#x27;ve emailed them asking for clarification.<p>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&#x27;t also remove the &#x27;forwarded addresses&#x27; though.

This is why I only use service A for domains. And service B for emails.

Even last week they were saying nothing would change, that Gandi remained independent inside Your.online.<p>That may be a new record.

The submitted title was &quot;Domain registrar Gandi gets bought out, screws existing customers&quot;. The latter bit is linkbait so I&#x27;ve edited it (as the site guidelines request - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>). But I realize the OP isn&#x27;t just complaining about price increases, so if someone can suggest a more accurate and neutral title, we can change it again.

How do I find out if this change affects me?<p>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&#x27;t received any communication about changes in pricing.

I honestly cannot believe the hubris. A 20% price hike <i>and</i> removal of features mid-term. If I don&#x27;t pay for the email accounts I apparently didn&#x27;t pay for, I will lose my business email accounts. I get the impression I should just have stuck with : &lt;official sounding&gt;_&lt;country&gt; @ gmail.com and moved on with my life. Maddening.

Note: the post is deleted from mastodon.<p>I managed to grab a screenshot earlier: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;JB4xpPs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;JB4xpPs</a>

I keep seeing unsourced claims on Mastodon that Gandi has been acquired by an unscrupulous entity, but I can&#x27;t find any official verification.<p>Is it true?

I have quite a few domains with Gandi, using their email service on a few because I&#x27;m lazy and it&#x27;s free. Not sure when (or if) I&#x27;ll receive notice of this change. Maybe it&#x27;s regional? Seems most of the comments show £ as currency.<p>This is going to burn all of their goodwill they accumulated with the &quot;no bullshit&quot; slogan. I will be swiftly moving all my domains, likely to Porkbun.

So who&#x27;s the trustworthy, low-bullshit registrar now?<p>I&#x27;ve been using Gandi for over a decade.

Link&#x27;s 404, Toot removed apparently. What happened? I use Gandi. They were acquired by a holdings company years ago but that&#x27;s all I know.

I&#x27;d be a lot happier as a long-time GANDI customer if there was any mention of this whatsoever on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.gandi.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.gandi.net</a> ... nothing there since 2022. :-(

What registrars has HN been using lately?<p>I&#x27;ve been super lazy and use Route53 for everything right now.

Has anyone felt that GoDaddy is doing the same thing? They just switched to Microsoft for domain hosting and email, and it&#x27;s a mess, and it seems as if all of the free mailboxes are gone including, free forwarding.

This seems short sighted. For just one mailbox per domain, 2.99 per month is 35.88 per year. This will wipe goodwill from an existing loyal customer base very quickly#.<p>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.<p>But, I have emailed Gandi to ask them to confirm, since the website doesn&#x27;t yet reflect this news, and it&#x27;s not the first time they may be victim of disinformation (action perhaps indicitative of trust built using Gandi).<p>#small, non wholesale customers.

From their statement it is not really clear if these changes affect new contracts (most probable) or are retroactively extended to existing contracts (not probable).<p>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.

Now I need to move all my domains away from Gandi. And I&#x27;m paid for years in advance. Any recommendations?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;w3yZy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;w3yZy</a>

As a us customer I have not received any emails about this. I reached out to them asking about it. They gave me the same boiler plate code. Sent back another email say thats basically fraud in the us.<p>their response<p>`My bad. I assume the mail you sent was after reading a communication made for clients paying in £. You&#x27;re not impacted by this communication.<p>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.<p>Should a change occur for you; you&#x27;ll receive a mail from us.`<p>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.<p>their reply<p>`I can only confirm what I shared with you above.`

So the change is instead of two free emails per domain <i>forever</i>, it&#x27;s going to be two free emails per domain <i>for the first year</i>.<p>Additionally, the price per email is going up massively:<p><pre><code> Standard: 0.31 GBP -&gt; 2.99 GBP (964%) Premium: 1.57 GBP -&gt; 5.99 GBP (381%)</code></pre>

What are some recommended alternatives?<p>I specifically need support for .li domains and acme.sh to renew certificates.

Tangential by related technical question:<p>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.<p>I know that in some sense public&#x2F;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?<p>I do understand that this equivalent to which I&#x27;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.

I haven&#x27;t seen anything from them yet - do they say anything about forwarding addresses?

Looks like fraud to me.

Not that this isn&#x27;t a travesty. But it&#x27;s worth pointing out that my first thought was: I need to bookmark this page to cite every time we end up in another giant front-page argument about &quot;I don&#x27;t use GMail because I don&#x27;t trust Google; I have my own domain with some tiny provider with human support where this can never happen.&quot;<p>Meh. The specifics here seem pretty damning, though. Most likely the new owners just didn&#x27;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.

I used Gandi&#x27;s email service as just an SMTP service to send notifications from various scripts and apps.<p>Any alternatives I can use? Ideally actual SMTP and not some API, some apps I use only support the SMTP protocol.

Crap, I was about to move there because the namecheap CEO is too impulsive and still waiting for the explanation of their &quot;third party getting hacked&quot; a few weeks ago. Where do I go now?

Sad to see Gandi worsening. It was a fantastic registrar that I recommended to everyone. Now I’m in the process to move everything to cloudflare and porkbun<p>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<p>What happened to Gandi - No bullsh*t?

How do european customer protection laws not protect against this??

That doesn&#x27;t match Gandi&#x27;s website.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gandi.net&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;domain" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gandi.net&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;domain</a><p>&gt; Two, free custom email addresses<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.gandi.net&#x2F;en&#x2F;gandimail&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.gandi.net&#x2F;en&#x2F;gandimail&#x2F;index.html</a><p>&gt; With every domain name you buy from Gandi you receive two free email inboxes through Gandi’s email service, each with 3GB of storage.

I&#x27;ve bought a strangers domain name with a deal to keep hosting their two e-mail addresses. Just set up everything last year and can&#x27;t easily move off. It now seems that this deal is going to cost me a lot more. I prepaid until 2029. Their tagline &quot;No Bullshit&quot; seems to no longer apply. I was a good client for over 10 years. Shame, that they don&#x27;t have a japanese office, but maybe I can do small claims court in taiwan.

I see that a lot of us rely heavily on the 2x free mail addresses we got per domain.<p>Is it an idea to join efforts &amp; money and rent a VPS from Hetzner and run our own mail server?

Dont know if its related to the recent changes but I opened a support request that has been open for 3 days now with the only reply being we&#x27;ve transfered you to a different part of the support team. it is related to moving registrar which i can see not being the highest priority but still quite frustrating.<p>netim replied within 30 minutes of me opening a ticket related to the same issue for context.

Were the mailboxes part of the contract, or were they a &quot;here&#x27;s a nice thing we&#x27;re giving you for free&quot; deal sweetener?

I think their motto was &quot;no bullshit&quot; or something<p>It looks like they don&#x27;t like to be coy about scamming their users either

Is migrating domains from Gandi to somewhere else easy&#x2F;possible? I&#x27;ve had the same domain for years, I used to pay like $20 for five years, but then I forgot to renew, and because I let it expire for a few days, now they are charging me $100&#x2F;year! Sour taste in my mouth about them even before this...

Is this confirmed?<p>TFA 404’s, gandi.net still advertises the two free mailboxes, and I haven’t received any communication from Gandi.

They no longer have a competitive advantage and I&#x27;ll be moving all my inboxes to MXRoute.<p>RIP Gandi

So I guess I will be looking for a new email provider. I have a couple of domains with emails + a lot of custom aliases. Don&#x27;t care for a web UI since I&#x27;m using an email client.<p>Anyone hosting with runbox.com? What can you tell me about it?

One of the comments on the mastodon site references bookmyname.com as an alternative with free email boxes (1G). They’re site looks pleasingly last millennium and also says powered by FreeBSD (also pleasing!)

i switched from gandi to porkbun a few years ago and cant recommend them enough. the least crufty domain and dns management site ever too, simple as it should be

My main complaint with gandi is the status page is a lie. Take now for example. You can check email but can’t send. Status page says all is well. Happens a lot.

For good or bad, Google domains does include email forwarding services... Though not sure how much I trust Google for domain registration in the long term.

I migrated my domains and deleted my account as soon as I got wind of the sale. It was a PITA but apparently well worth it.

Are there any reputable registrars with APIs with Terraform providers, outside of Gandi and AWS?<p>Just not sure I can give that up!

Wow Gandi was one of th4 old school internet “good guys”. Are there any similar quality registrars left?

I don&#x27;t have a mastodont account, if that makes a difference, but I cannot see anything.

Can someone add context to the “gets bought out” part?

I switched from Gandi to Porkbun, never looked back

Uh, I didn&#x27;t get an email from Gandi...

Capitalism as usual.