Sharing Passwords via Email? What You Should Do Instead.

If you’re tempted to share a password over email, there are several security risks you should be aware of before doing so. Sending passwords over email is dangerous because emails are unencrypted and can be intercepted by cybercriminals. When data is unencrypted, it could be read or saved by the wrong or malicious recipients.

Read on to learn why sending passwords through email is risky and how you can use a password manager to safely share your passwords instead.

Why sending passwords by email is a bad idea

Although sending documents or messages via email seems convenient, here are the reasons why it is dangerous to send passwords via email.

Your message lacks encryption

Since most emails aren’t encrypted, anyone can read your messages in plain text, including email providers or cybercriminals who intercept your emails. When you share your password over email, you run the risk of a cybercriminal seeing and stealing sensitive information due to your message’s lack of encryption.

You could send it to the wrong recipient

Imagine you try to share the password for a very important account with your mother, whose email address is mom@emailaddress.com. Instead of sending the password to your mother, you accidentally make a typo and send your password to nom@emailaddress.com, meaning a random person can now use the password you shared to access important information. Making a typo and sending your password to an unintended recipient is one of the biggest risks of sharing your password over email. There is no way to recall the message after it’s sent and no guarantee that the wrong recipient will delete your message. Even if a recipient doesn’t use it maliciously, if their email account ever gets hacked, a cybercriminal could also find your password and try to access your account.

It is even more dangerous if the password you shared with the wrong person is one that you reuse across multiple accounts. If the wrong person knows your password to one account and tries it for other accounts, they can take over your other accounts.

Your email account could get hacked

A major security risk that you could encounter when sharing passwords over email is your email account being hacked. If your email account gets hacked, a cybercriminal can gain access to your private information, including any emails you have sent or received with passwords in their contents. A hacker could collect any passwords they find and use them to access other accounts. Not only would this jeopardize the privacy of your information but also the information of whoever shared or received a password via email in your correspondences.

Your emails go through multiple systems

If you’ve ever wondered how emails actually make it from one person to another, you might not know that emails go through several systems to reach their desired recipient. Let’s say you compose an email with an important password in the body of the message to send to your child. After you hit send, your email client (Outlook, Apple Mail, etc.) connects to an outgoing server, which will validate your information before actually sending the message. Once the validation process is complete, your email will get placed in a queue while the server retrieves information about your child’s server. Your child’s server will validate your email account and deliver the message to your child. Based on this process, it’s especially dangerous to send passwords or confidential information over email due to how many hoops an email has to jump through before landing in its intended place. If any of the systems get compromised as your email travels from one server to another, your password could be revealed.

An alternative way to send a password

Luckily, there is a safer way for you to send passwords to friends, family or colleagues: password managers.

Use a password manager

Instead of relying on email as your main method of sharing passwords, you should start using a password manager. Password managers not only securely store your passwords, but they also come with advanced features that allow you to create strong passwords and share them safely with your intended recipients.

When you use a password manager like Keeper^®, your passwords are encrypted with zero-knowledge encryption, which means that they are encrypted at all times so no one – not even Keeper – can see them besides you. Sharing your passwords with someone who also has a Keeper vault is convenient since you only need to invite them to your record. You can choose whether you want this person to be able to view, edit or share your record, and you can remove their access to your record at any time.

Use the One-Time Share feature

If you want to share your passwords securely with someone who isn’t using Keeper, you can do so by using the One-Time Share feature. Simply choose how long you want the recipient to view what you share and send your password safely. A recipient who gets a One-Time Share link can only view your password, so they will not be able to edit or share your password with anyone else.

Don’t rely on email to send passwords

Now that you know how risky it is to share passwords over email and what to do instead, you should rely on Keeper Password Manager to make it easy for you to securely share passwords. Keeper can create, store and share your passwords and other private information safely with its zero-knowledge encryption.

Start a free 30-day trial of Keeper Password Manager today to be better protected against scams and cyber attacks.