Secure Way to Share Passwords via Email

Secure Way to Share Passwords via Email

June 23, 2023 / in Blog / by Zafar Khan, RPost CEO

How to securely share a password, credit card, or login information by email.

It’s summer now, and you’re going to be headed on a nice vacation soon. You’re putting together all your to-do lists so you can truly escape from the office without anyone bothering you. About a week out from your big trip, you ask your colleague, Jerry, to cover for you on some key accounts. Jerry, being the mensch that he is, agrees. After crafting that clever out-of-office reply, you’re now ready to send over your login credentials to Jerry who happens to work remotely in Tashkent. 

That’s when it hits you: Password Pause. How do you get your login ID and password out to Jerry via email without worrying about it getting stolen/intercepted/mistakenly forwarded, etc.?

Password Pause is indeed a scourge. By some highly unscientific estimates, it costs billions in lost productivity, as workers around the world sit in their cubes and offices dumbfounded for who-knows-how-long as they try and figure out how to get password info out to people who aren’t less than 100 feet away. 

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a simple, easy-to-use cure for Password Pause that you could get without a prescription? The great news is that now there is! 

With RMail’s Disappearing Ink™ with message level encryption you can share passwords safely and confidently via email. How is this possible? Because with Disappearing Ink™, the password…

  1. will never land in the sender’s sent folder, 
  2. will not be part of any back-and-forth reply thread, 
  3. will disappear after the first view by the recipient (if set this way), 
  4. can only be accessed after multi-factor authentication, and 
  5. does not remain in the recipient’s inbox. 

Note that (1) and (5) are particularly important if there is a future breach of the sender or recipient’s email account, as those parts of the email history will not be disclosed or available.

Disappearing Ink™ is also great for those unfortunate instances where there is a virus that copies all the email in one’s email account to a cybercriminal’s server. The risk of you (or your recipient) getting this virus / malware is very real, which is why you want to minimize any content saved in people’s email accounts.

Another risk that would give anyone (password) pause is when there is someone receiving sensitive information encrypted but then replies, “THANKS – GOT IT” returning that sensitive content unencrypted, which can happen with senders relying on TLS encryption. For this reason, redacting content from email is vital, as it does not appear in the reply thread (when RMail Disappearing Ink™ or RMail Redact+ features are used).

Imagine a world without Password Pause where people can live without fear, without uncertainty, without that classic dumbfounded look on their face. That world is now here, so feel free to contact us to learn more about RMail and its Disappearing Ink™ feature. This is included inside RPost’s free-to-install RMail for Outlook add-in.