A modern way to send a secure email attachment

by Siddharth Garg Helping Businesses Grow

Email attachments are not secure. Anyone can forward the email, download and distribute the file or save a copy for later re-use. The fact that you lose control over your attachments as soon as you hit the send button makes sending secure email attachments challenging. In this article we explore an alternative way to send secure email attachments.

Why not to use email attachments?

Files can be large. It takes time to attach and download them, and space to store them. Attachments can be downloaded and forwarded. You tend to lose control of your files as soon as you hit send. It is difficult to reliably password protect a pdf without Acrobat Reader or other hyper-specialized & expensive software. Moreover, Client engagement on email attachments cannot be tracked. Lastly, You cannot do things automatically when your attachments are viewed.

Owing to these disadvantages, it makes sense to look for an alternate way of sending secure attachments through email. Secure file sharing through trackable links is a promising new avenue that has many advantages over traditional attachments.

Advantages of using document links

Link properties can be changed on the fly. Links can also be used to create gated content. This means that when you send a secure document as a link, you can put up an identity wall on your document that only lets certain users through or asks for some specific information (e.g. capture lead's email) before giving access to your content, thus providing a way to send files securely. Links can be used to track files & documents and produce detailed analytics. This includes a number of metrics such as file downloads, unique views, time spent on different pages, etc... Finally, you can easily replace content without re-sharing the link.

Certain apps allow you to upload your files onto cloud storages and create links out of them. When viewing the files, they may appear as PDFs or other native format. Thus sharing these file links may simply simulate sharing PDF links. However the type of security settings you can configure or the metrics that you can track on those links vary from app to app. Below we talk about these tools in detail. With your files converted to secure links, you can now add them to your emails like any other hyperlinks, thus securing your Gmail, Outlook or any other email client's attachments.

More Information

There are a variety of file sharing tools available in the market that can send files such as word documents, PDFs, presentations and others as secure links. However the method of conversion and the capabilities of the link varies from app to app. We have segregated these into 2 categories. Content creation tools (Qwilr, GetAccept, proposify etc...) & content sharing tools (CloudFiles, DocSend, HubSpot Documents etc...).

In the full article, we cover these topics in more detail and also present an infographic on the various advantages of using links vs attachments. This gives a complete overview of how to send a secure email attachment.