Sooner or later everyone has to hand someone a password. A Wi-Fi code for a contractor, a client portal login for a colleague, banking details for an accountant. The most common way to do it is still the worst one: typing it into an email and pressing send.
Why email is the wrong place for a password
Email feels private, but it behaves more like a postcard than a sealed envelope. A password sent by email has a few problems that have nothing to do with how strong the password is:
- It is stored forever, twice. The message sits in your Sent folder and in the recipient's inbox indefinitely. Either mailbox getting compromised years later still exposes the password.
- It is searchable. Anyone who gains access to either mailbox can simply search for "password" and harvest the results. Attackers do exactly that.
- It gets forwarded. You lose control the moment you send it. The thread can be forwarded, quoted, or synced to devices you have never heard of.
- It can transit in the clear. Modern providers encrypt mail between servers most of the time, but you cannot verify the whole path, and the message is readable by the providers at both ends regardless.
Texting is not much better. The password still lives in two message histories, and SMS in particular has no meaningful encryption at all.
The principle: separate the secret from the door
Every serious approach to sharing a secret uses the same idea: split the information across two channels, so that intercepting one channel gives an attacker nothing.
In practice that means the secret travels as a link to an encrypted message, and the thing that opens it (a passphrase) travels another way: a phone call, a text, or in person. Someone who sees only the link cannot read the secret. Someone who overhears only the passphrase has nothing to use it on.
What to look for in a secret-sharing tool
If you are choosing a tool for this, hold it to these requirements:
- End-to-end encryption. The message should be encrypted on your device before it is uploaded, and decrypted only on the recipient's device. The service in the middle should hold only ciphertext it cannot open.
- A passphrase that never reaches the server. If the service can check the passphrase against the message content, the service can read the message. The passphrase should stay between you and your recipient.
- Expiry. The link should stop working on its own after a deadline you choose, because nobody remembers to clean up shared secrets manually.
- A view limit and revocation. You should be able to cap how many times the link opens, and to kill it instantly if you sent it to the wrong person.
- No account required for the recipient. A tool your recipient has to sign up for is a tool they will ask you to work around.
How Secure Send does it
We built Secure Send to meet exactly that list. You write the message in your browser, choose a passphrase, and get a link. The message is encrypted on your device before anything is uploaded; Privatt stores only ciphertext it cannot open, and the passphrase never reaches our servers. You share the link one way and the passphrase another, set an expiry and an optional view limit, and you can revoke the link at any time from your sent list.
Your recipient needs no account and no software. They open the link, enter the passphrase, and read the message in their browser. Guessing is not an option either: repeated wrong passphrases lock the message behind an escalating cooldown.
Try Secure Send: free with every Privatt account, no account needed for your recipient.
A habit worth keeping
However you share a secret, the checklist is short: never put the secret itself in an email or chat message, always split the link and the passphrase across two channels, and prefer links that expire on their own. The best moment to adopt the habit is before the first mailbox breach, not after.