How to send a password securely

Sooner or later you have to hand someone a password. The Wi-Fi code for a guest, a shared streaming login for the family, a database credential for a teammate, the keys to an account you are handing over. The instinct is to type it into whatever window is open, an email, a text, a Slack message, and hit send. That is the one thing you should not do, and understanding why takes about a minute, so let us cover that before the better options.

Why email and chat are the wrong place

The problem is not that the message gets intercepted on the way. The problem is that it stays. A password you email is stored, in readable form, on at least two mail servers and in two inboxes, and it will sit there for years. Anyone who later gets into either account, or who is handed a backup, or who simply scrolls back far enough, can read it. The same is true of a Slack channel, an SMS, or a sticky note in a shared document. You are not sending a secret. You are publishing it to a permanent log and hoping nobody reads that log later.

This is the same lingering problem your clipboard has, just at a larger scale. A copied password hangs around in shared memory until something overwrites it, which is why we wrote a whole guide on whether it is safe to copy and paste passwords in the first place. Sending one through chat takes that short-lived exposure and makes it effectively forever.

The best way: a one-time secret link

The cleanest answer for a single password is a link that holds the secret and destroys it the moment it is opened. You paste the password into a tool, it gives you a link, you send the link through any channel you like, and the first time the recipient opens it the password is shown once and then deleted. Forward the link, refresh the page, or try it a day later, and there is nothing there. This is usually called a burn-after-reading or self-destructing note.

It solves the lingering problem at the root. The actual password never lives in the email or the chat, only a link does, and that link is dead the instant it is used. If a good tool encrypts the secret in your browser so the server only ever stores scrambled text, even the service hosting the link cannot read what you sent. That is the model behind our free private note tool: type the password, get a one-time link, send it, and it burns on open. No account, nothing kept.

How to use a burn-after-reading link well

• Send the link and the context separately if you can. Put the password in the one-time link, and say which account it is for in a different message. A stray link with no label is useless to anyone who finds it.
• Tell the recipient it is one-time. People reflexively forward links or open them twice. A quick heads-up that the page only works once saves a confused follow-up.
• Treat opening it as confirmation. If you send a link and it has already been burned when your recipient tries it, someone else got there first. Rotate the password and investigate.

For ongoing access: a password manager

A one-time link is perfect for handing over a single secret. For a login that two or more people use regularly, a shared streaming account, a company tool, a joint bank login, the better tool is a password manager with a shared vault. Most of the well-known ones, including Bitwarden, 1Password and others, let you share a credential into a vault that specific people can open. The password is never copied into a message at all. You grant access, the other person uses it through their own manager, and you can revoke it later without changing the password for everyone.

This also sidesteps a subtle trap: when you share an ongoing password by message, you lose track of where it has been pasted. A manager keeps the secret in one controlled place, and access is a setting you can turn off, not a message you can never un-send.

If you have no other option

Sometimes you genuinely cannot set up a tool, and the person needs the password in the next thirty seconds. If you are stuck with a messaging app, an end-to-end encrypted one like Signal beats plain SMS or email by a wide margin, because only you and the recipient can read it in transit. Encryption in transit is the idea we unpack in what end-to-end encryption actually means. Two extra habits make even this safer:

• Split the secret across two channels. Send the username by email and the password by text, or read the password aloud over a call. A reader of one channel then has half of nothing.
• Delete it on both sides, and rotate it soon. Remove the message from your sent items and ask the recipient to delete their copy. Better still, treat the shared password as temporary and change it once they are in.

None of these are as clean as a one-time link, because you are relying on people to delete things and on chat histories to behave. They are the fallback, not the plan.

What never to do

• Email a password in plain text, especially with the username in the same message.
• Post it in a group chat or a shared channel where the history is searchable.
• Write it into a shared document or a note that syncs in readable form to a server.
• Reuse the same password across the accounts you share, so one leak does not become five.

The thread running through all of this is the same one behind every post in our series on whether your clipboard is a security risk: a secret is only safe while it is unreadable to everyone but the person who needs it. Email and chat fail that test because they keep a readable copy forever. A one-time link passes it because the secret exists for one read and then it is gone.

Frequently asked questions