I'm about to share some sensitive information via email, and I really wish I could prevent the other person from forwarding or copying or downloading this content.
Well, fortunately for us here in Gmail, we can do just that by using a feature called Confidential Mode.
Before I go ahead and hit send on this email, I want to come all the way down to the bottom where we're familiar with other functions, such as attaching a file or inserting a link. And if we come over here to the right, you can see that there's this little lock icon called Toggle Confidential Mode.
By selecting this option here, we are given the following dialogue box, which tells us that recipients won't have the option to forward copy print or download this email.
And then down below we've got two different options to choose from. The first one of course is when will this email expire? If we select the dropdown, we have five different options available to us. Everything from a day, a week, one month, three months, or five years. Yes, it's a pretty big jump from three months to five years.
And the nice thing is, no matter which one that you select, it will tell you here to the right of the dropdown what that date will be.
So instead of doing the math, well, how far is five years and oh yeah, 2029. That makes a lot of sense.
So depending on what it is you are sending and what you think would be an appropriate amount of time, let's go with one week here. I'm going to say it's going to expire in one week, that's April 23rd.
And then down below, the second thing that we need to decide is if we are going to require a passcode. So by default, it's going to be set to no SMS passcode, meaning they will not receive a text message or an email message depending if they are a Gmail user or not.
Or we can require them to use a passcode when they receive this email. For our example, I'm going to select this to no SMS passcode, and I'm going to hit save.
Now nothing has been set yet. I can continue to add other files or edit my email, but you will notice down below that we have this new section, which is telling me that this content will expire on this particular date.
If I want to remove confidential mode, I can simply click the X over here. And if I want to change any of my settings, I can hit edit and go back to the dialogue. But let's go ahead and hit send and see what this looks like to the recipient.
I've now switched over to my other email account. Now I've received this confidential email, and here you can see, I can still see the subject line, but in the preview text, it's already telling me that this message was sent in confidential mode. Let's go ahead and open up this email here.
You can see I have all the same content of the regular email, including the attachment here down below, and it's notifying me that the content will expire on this particular date. But the big thing that you may not notice is that I am actually trying to click and select these words. I'm also trying to right click on these words and I can't do it. It's not allowing me to select or copy the words on the screen here.
And if I do, go ahead and open up this attachment. You will notice here that if I click on the more option, I do not have the options to download to print or to save this document. Either I can only open it here within my browser.
Now of course, there's nothing that will stop someone from doing a print screen or taking a picture of this screen, but at the very least, they cannot download or print or copy this attachment or any of the texts that you've included here within this screen.
Now, jumping back to my original email account, I want to show you how you can revoke or remove access to someone that you've sent a confidential email. Here we are, and you can see that this sent email is the same. It's going to expire in about a week's time, but to the right, I have the option to remove access for that user. I don't have to wait until April 23rd. If I want to no longer give them access, I can simply select this, remove access link, and it will immediately be removed. And of course, I can still come back in here and renew that access in case I've made a mistake.
Jumping back now into the recipient's email address, you can see that it doesn't remove or eliminate the email. Here you can see this is the same email that we saw a moment ago, but when I go to open it, it tells me that this email has expired. There is no content here, and there is no attachment.
So the next time you go to share some sensitive or personal information with others, consider using confidential mode if appropriate for your needs. Thank you so much for watching this video. And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
