(See the next section if you have a Mac.) While there are others, 7zip is free and uses much better encryption algorithms. On Microsoft Windows, we’ll be using a free app called 7zip. You can tweak the settings on this page if you want to make it a little easier for the recipient to enter, but make sure it’s at least 12 characters long (20 is better) and includes upper & lower characters, numbers, and special characters. Just make it easy: go to this online password generator and have it create a killer password for you.

This is a crucial step in the process – don’t wimp out here and go with your name, “password”, or “12345678”. When your recipient decrypts this zip file, they will get all the original files back.īefore we can encrypt the file, we need to choose a password. Fortunately, the same tools we’re going to use to encrypt the files will also take care of compressing and bundling them all into a single output file called a ‘zip file’. Whether you have one or many files to send, you should compress and zip them up into a single bundle. But at a bare minimum, you need to encrypt the files themselves. Ideally, you will want to do both – that is, encrypt the files you’re sending and then send those files using an encrypted transfer mechanism. We’re going to be talking about two distinct modes of encryption here: encrypting the files themselves (‘data at rest’) and encrypting the files as they are traversing the interwebs (‘data in motion’). If done properly, encryption makes a file unintelligible gibberish – and only someone with the key can decrypt it. Email is just not secure (unless you go to great pains to make it so) and your file(s) may last forever on some server somewhere, even if both the sender and receiver “delete” the email.Īs you might suspect, the key to sending files securely is to use encryption. You should never send this sort of info in an email – as an attachment or in the email body itself.

If you need to send someone private or sensitive information over the internet (like, say, sending your financial info to your tax preparer or sending medically sensitive information), then you really must do it securely.

How to put password on zip folder