Request Files with OWL

Create a Request

1. Open OWL Browser. Right-click an empty area and choose New → Request files… — or right-click a folder and choose Request files into this folder… to make that folder the default destination.
2. Say what you’re asking for (“Signed lease — unit 4B”) and, if you like, add instructions for the sender.
3. Set how long the link stays open and how many files — and how large — it accepts. Optionally require a password, or ask senders for their name.
4. Choose Create link. Copy the link, show the QR code, or send it however you normally would.

Every request you have made lives under File requests… in the same right-click menu, where you can copy the link again, edit it, close it, reopen it, or delete it.

What Senders See

The link opens a simple page that shows your name, what you asked for, and your instructions. The sender can add their name, email and a short note, then drag files in or pick them. Each file shows its progress as it is encrypted and sent, and a sender who picked the wrong file can take it back until you have accepted it.

Review & Accept

When files arrive, OWL Browser shows a notice — “3 files … waiting for review” — and QUAIL sends you a message with a link straight to that request. In the request you can:

• Preview images, video and audio, or download any file, before deciding.
• Accept a file into the request’s folder, or into any other folder. If a file of that name is already there, the new one is kept alongside it under a distinct name.
• Delete a file you don’t want; its space is freed straight away.
• Block a sender, so their copy of the link stops working.

Files from people outside your account are held back on purpose: nothing a stranger sends reaches your drive, your sync folders or your shared folders until you accept it. If you’d rather skip the review, turn off Review files before they go into your drive on the request; files are then filed into its folder the next time you open OWL Browser.

How It Stays Private

Each request gets its own encryption key pair. The public half goes to the sender’s page; the private half is locked with your own account key, so only you can ever unlock it. The sender’s browser encrypts each file with a fresh key and seals that key so that only the request’s private key can open it — the same ECIES sealing OWL uses everywhere else.

What the server never sees: the contents of any file, the request’s title and instructions (encrypted with a key derived from the link), the sender’s name, email and note (sealed to the request key), or the link’s secret itself. What it does see, as with every file in OWL: each file’s name and size, so it can store it and enforce your limits — and a salted fingerprint of the sender’s network address, which is what lets you block a sender without OWL keeping their IP address.

When you accept a file, your browser opens its key with the request’s private key and re-seals it to your own account key — from then on it is an ordinary OWL file, just as if you had uploaded it yourself. Deleting the request later leaves your accepted files untouched.

Limits & Storage

Files count against your OWL storage from the moment they arrive, so a request can never fill someone else’s account — and if your storage is full, senders are told so instead of their upload silently failing. Deleting an upload frees its space; a deleted upload also frees its slot, so a sender can replace a wrong file even on a one-file request.

From the Command Line

The OWL command-line tool does everything the browser does, end-to-end encrypted the same way — handy for scripting or for sending a large batch:

owl request create --title "Site photos" --folder Projects --days 7
owl request show 12               # what arrived, and from whom
owl request accept 12 --all       # file everything waiting
owl request upload "https://ndevr.org/OWL/request#…" *.jpg --name "Ada"   # as a sender, no account