How do password protects mail attachments?

Hi, everyone. Let's get right to the question, "I need to send a document to someone, but it needs to be secure. I don't see an option in my email to add a password, but certainly there must be there somewhere. What am I missing?" So what you're looking for, honestly, it's not that unreasonable, unfortunately, it just doesn't exist.

You may say it must be there somewhere, and I wish it were there somewhere, but it's not there actually is no part of, the standard email protocol that calls out the ability to encrypt an attachment independently of the entire email message. And even then, email encryption itself is extremely complicated, mostly due to lack of standards, and mostly due to I don't know, I guess I call it a lack of interest in email providers only because it becomes incredibly difficult to interact with all the other email programs and all the other email providers doing it their own unique way. There are solutions there, just not the solutions you're really asking about.

What you're looking for is something along the lines of: you attach your document to an email, you ask your email program to encrypt the attachment, and then you hit send. Like I said, that doesn't exist. You can't do that. What you can do is what I call flipping the script. In other words, you encrypt your document, you attach the document to your email, and you hit send. It's conceptually very simple, but it does require one little, a bit of coordination that works like this. You and your recipient need to agree on what kind of encryption is going to be used, and you then somehow need to share the decryption key with your recipient, ideally through some other means. By that I mean, you don't email them the password to your encrypted file because that's going down the same path that the encrypted attachment was.

That means that if your email has been compromised, you've now given the compromiser both the encrypted attachment and the encryption password. What I typically do in a case like this is if I'm going to send an encrypted document to someone, I'll do that through email, but then I will text them the password or use an instant messaging client to get them the password. But some other approach to getting them the decryption key that will allow them to decrypt the attachment that needs the security we've decided it needs.

That ultimately is the simplest solution. It's a little cumbersome, but it is the simplest solution that works across pretty much all platforms and all email programs which encryption you want to use. Well, there again, it kind of sort of depends. My recommendation is to use something simple like zip. You may need to use a program like WinZip 7-zip to create your file with a password. If you use 7-zip, make sure you use the zip format and not7-zip native .7zip format. It's the zip file format that is basically compatible across almost every platform, and that includes decrypting it. If you open a password-protected zip file under Windows and Windows File Explorer, it'll ask you for the password.

That's all you need. So that's the way that I would suggest doing this. Now, there is one other solution that, especially if this is something you do often, or just plan to invest a little-bit more into, and that is use a different email provider, specifically proton mail. Proton mail is effectively built around encryption if you send email from one proton mail user to another. That email, if you mark it as such, is encrypted, and it literally is just hit a checkbox, that email is encrypted before it's sent, and it's decrypted when it arrives. If you are sending to a non ProtonMail user, you can then encrypt the entire mail again with a checkbox.

But this time when you send your email, what actually gets sent is a link to the recipient who on clicking the link is then prompted for a password that you've provided again via some other channel that allows them to read your message and download your attachments through proton mails, web interface. It's probably the simplest solution of all if you're willing to changed mail providers. But if not. Zip up it is you want to use a password when you zip it and then just attach the zip file and send it on, that works and works.