No email. No name. Just a password.

You asked for it, so we built it. Creating a VitalSend account now takes one thing: a password. You pick a username, you pick a password, and you are done. No email address. No real name. No verification step.

Anonymity is still the default. There has never been a trace between accounts and sent files. Now there is no trace between your email and your account.

What signup actually is

The whole form is two fields:

• A username you choose. Make it anything. It does not have to be you.
• A password.

That is a complete account. You can send a file immediately.

Where email fits, and where it does not

Email is optional. It exists for two reasons and nothing else:

• Password reset. If you add an email address, you can reset a forgotten password through it.
• Billing receipts. If you buy credits, receipts go to that address.

That is the entire job of email on VitalSend. It does not change what we store about a transfer, it does not change the encryption, and it does not tie you to the files you send. It is a convenience for recovery and receipts, and you can leave it blank.

If you want reset or receipts but would rather not hand over a personal address, give VitalSend an alias instead of your real inbox. An email relay service hands you a forwarding address that reaches you without exposing the real one. SimpleLogin, addy.io, Firefox Relay, DuckDuckGo Email Protection, and Apple's Hide My Email all do this. To us it is just an address. To you it is another layer between your identity and your account.

If you do leave it blank, keep your password. A username-only account has no reset path and no recovery codes. Lose the password and the account is gone, so you simply make a new one. That is the same finality the files themselves have, and it is deliberate.

Why this is the default, not an option

Making anonymity a buried setting would send the wrong signal. Asking for an email before you have done anything tells you the service wants to know who you are. VitalSend does not. The default account asks for nothing that identifies you, because that is what the product is.

Your password is the account, so we hardened it

Once there is no email and no reset, the password is the whole key. In the same release we raised the standard for it.

• We require a real one. At least 12 characters, checked against known breached and common passwords. Weak choices are rejected, and a live strength meter shows you where you stand as you type.
• We dropped the busywork. No forced symbols, no mandatory 90-day resets. Modern guidance is clear that those rules push people toward weaker, more predictable passwords.
• We store it so we cannot read it. Your password runs through a keyed hash with a secret server pepper before anything is saved. The stored value cannot be turned back into your password, by us or by anyone who walks off with the database.

A strong password you keep safe is the entire account. Treat it that way.

Already have an account?

Accounts made under the old email-required signup can become anonymous too. Add a username in your account settings, then remove the email. Removal is allowed once a username is in place, because an account always needs one login identifier. What you are left with is the same username-and-password account a fresh signup gets. The same rule follows: no email means no reset, so keep your password.

Payments

A fair question: if you pay for credits, can the payment track you?

Paying by card means your bank and our payment processor see a charge to VitalSend. That is true of any card payment anywhere, and the card network is outside our reach. What matters is what that charge connects to on our side, and the answer is nothing you send.

Credits and transfers are two separate systems. Buying credits never touches a transfer. The credit ledger records a date and nothing else: no times, no file names, no record of what you sent or who received it. A payment proves you bought credits. It says nothing about how you used them.

What VitalSend is

VitalSend sends a file once, then destroys it.

The file is encrypted in your browser, before a single byte reaches us, with a key we never receive. The recipient opens it exactly once. After download, the file and what little metadata surrounded it are removed from our systems. We keep no transfer history, no file archive, and no log tying an account to what it sent.

Accounts persist. Transfers do not. And now an account can be nothing more than a username and a password.