How to share your Passwords Safely

When you need to share your domain or website login details it’s tempting to do so by email, because it’s so easy. But because email isn’t a very secure form of communication, sending private information by email is not such a good idea. Luckily, there’s a simple solution (and it even makes you feel a bit like Jane Bond).

How to communicate your password safely

There are a couple of simple ideas here:

  1. Send your login name separately from your password
  2. Send your password through a secure secret link service

So let’s do this in three simple steps…

1. Write your email as normal, but leave out the password

First you write your email as you normally would, but instead of all your login details only include your username (so leave out your password). Say that you’ll send your password separately.

Email message with login details, but without password.

Create your first email with a link to your login page and username only. So you leave the password out.

2. Create a separate, secret message with your password in it

Now go to privnote.com (this is a free service for sending secure private messages) and create a secret link with your password written in there. This link will work only once and then gets destroyed* (so you need to resist the temptation to try it and see if there’s a tiny explosion afterwards – there isn’t by the way, I checked :).

* But even if wasn’t, it only has a password in it (which is useless without your username or what it’s for), so separating your login details like this is very safe.

Secret note with password written in privnote

Write your note with just the password in it at privnote.com

When you click the ‘create note’ button, privnote makes a unique link for you that you can copy and paste into a separate email. Here is what it looks like:

Secret link created by privnote, ready to copy and paste

Now you can copy and paste your link into a seperate email

3. Send the link to your secret message

And finally, put on your best secret agent look and paste this secret link into an email and send it. The email still isn’t secure, but the link in it is.

Email message with a link to a secure message in it.

Then in a separate email send the link to the secret password message you just created.

That’s it, you’ve now securely sent your password.

But is it still OK to use email if it’s not secure?

Yes, for sure. Email is great and superconvenient. You only need to be a little bit more careful if you’re sending private or sensitive information (like passwords). If you’d like to know a bit more about email security and why in general you can send things the normal way, here’s an article from a nice guy that explains why there’s no need to panic about sending email.