How to send sensitive files using Password.File app

So you need to email someone a few sensitive files, but you are worried someone might be able to look at them in the middle of the transfer? For example, your tax agency wants you to send them your bank statements. Are you sure your email provider does not scan your emails to show you personalized ads, for instance? Would it be better to send the files in such a way that their contents would not be readable by anyone except the final recipient?

The solution is to encrypt the files you want to send first, and send the encrypted files insteads of the originals. To anyone looking at the encrypted files, they would be just blobs of 0s and 1s, making no sense. Only someone who knows the password you used to encrypt the files would be able to rearrange the 0s and 1s back in the original order.

There are many possible ways to do the file encryption, with various levels of security and learning curves involved. One of the easiest ones to use (while maintaining the security of the files) is password-file.com  cloud app, or one of the Password.File  apps:

Available now

Available now

Coming soon

Coming soon

For a quick once-in-a-while task, the cloud app works best: open the password-file.com  link in your favorite web browser, select the files you want to password-protect, and choose the encryption password. The cloud app would perform the encryption in the could, and prepare the encrypted container that you would download to your device. You would email the encrypted container file to the recipient and also call them to let them know the password you've chosen. Tell them to go to password-file.com  to extract the original files from the encrypted container file you sent them. (The original files are NOT stored in the cloud, they are only there while the encryption or decryption is going on.)

The cloud app is easy to use (nothing to install on your computer!), but it is only suitable for a small number of relatively small files. Besides, if your internet connection is not very fast, it may take a long time to upload and download the files. To avoid such limitations, a local app such as the Password.File  app for Windows would work better: it works very much in the same way as the cloud app, but all processing is happening on your own device, nothing is sent to the could.

When you run the Password.File app on your device, it asks you about the action you would like to perform:

If you are sending the files to someone, you would obvously choose the first option. (If you are the recipient, choose the second link.)

On the next screen, you would select one or several files that you want to protect with a password. There are no restrictions on the types of files that you can select: any DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PDF, MP3, MP4, or any other file can be encrypted. Next, choose the folder on your computer where you would like the final encrypted container file to be put, and of course, the password to protect the file(s) with:

After collecting the required information from you, the app would encrypt each file you've selected with the password of your choosing (using the strongest encryption algorithm AES-256), and put the encrypted files inside of a password-protected container:

As with the cloud app, you would send the encrypted container file to the recipient, knowing that your original files will not be available to anyone who might come across of the encrypted container while it's in transit. The recipient would use the same local app (or the cloud app) to extract the original files from the container file:

If the password is correct, the original file(s) are extracted from the encrypted container and saved to the recipient's device:

After the original files have been extracted, the encrypted container file may be deleted, it's no longer needed.

Happy computing!

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