I often need to get sensitive information from clients: domain registrar login, FTP credentials, hosting account login, etc. Sending this kind of info by email is not a good idea, it’s too insecure (although it’s hard to keep clients from doing it anyway sometimes).
What should you do instead? A phone call to share long passwords is not that helpful. But there are some online tools that are built to ‘self-destruct’ once they’re read or after a specific short timeframe. Here are three.
This is my go-to tool for sending secrets online. You can attach files, and set it to delete the message after a set number of views or a certain number of hours. The sender types or pastes their sensitive info, selects options and saves, then sends the recipient the link. Very easy to use.
This one allows you to set a time limit as short as 5 minutes (virtually a self-destruct on reading) and a password (or generate a random one).
Similar to the first two, privnote also has some other features. By default it asks for confirmation by the recipient before showing and destroying the note (which you can disable). You can also send yourself, the sender, a note when the private message has been destroyed. And you can set the message to self-destruct immediately after reading.
Any of these tools is a much safer option than using email to send confidential info.
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