How to Send Self-expiring Confidential Emails with Passcode in Gmail

Classifying information, to be specific, confidential emails is one of the major security problems when working with organizations and clients. You need to follow the guidelines to classify emails and send them in normal, private or confidential mode. Among the many features of Gmail, you can easily send confidential emails using the Gmail confidential mode feature. Send confidential emails can also be done in Outlook client.

However, we will focus on sending confidential emails in Gmail. The beauty of Gmail is that it self-expires confidential emails after the set expiry date. Now let’s dive into how to send self-expiring confidential emails in Gmail.

Why Send Confidential Emails in Gmail

In Outlook and many other email clients, you can mark the email as confidential to prevent certain user actions. However, you can’t set an expiry date to remove the content of the confidential email. In contrast, you are required to set an expiry date in order to send confidential mail in Gmail. In addition, the recipient can’t do the following actions when receiving a confidential email:

The recipient cannot copy or print the email.
Can’t forward or download the email.
The recipient Can only read the content before the set expiry date.
The email will show a message with the expiry date indicating that is a self-expiring confidential email.

Sending Confidential Emails in Gmail

With the above details, you must know that the confidential mode in Gmail is something different compared to other email clients. Follow the below instructions to send a self-expiring confidential email.

Step 1: Log in to your Gmail and compose an email.

Step 2: Click on the “Confidential mode” icon. This is available at the bottom icon list in the desktop interface.

Sending Confidential Email in Gmail how to in tech — Sending Confidential Emails in Gmail on Desktop interface

Step 3: On Mobile devices, tap on the three dots icon and select the “Confidential mode” option.

Choose Confidential Mode Option in Gmail Mobile App how to in tech — Choosing the “Confidential mode” on mobile devices

Step 4: On the next screen, set an expiry date for the email.

Step 5: You can set the expiry date from one of the available options of 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 1 year, 3 months or 5 years.

Step 6: The “Require Passcode” option has two options – No SMS passcode and SMS passcode.

Step 7: Recipients do not need a password to open a confidential email when they select the “No SMS passcode” option. However, if the recipient does not use Gmail, then he or she should log in with a Google account to view the content of the email you have sent.

Step 8: When selecting the “SMS passcode” option, you need to enter the phone number of the recipient. He or she can request a passcode when opening the confidential email and receive the passcode in the number you provide. Gmail supports SMS passcode for countries in North America, South America, Europe and Australia. However, only India, Korea and Japan are supported in Asia.

Step 9: After setting the expiration date and passcode option, you can start typing the content and send your email. You will see a notification in the message body with the content expiry date. Click on the “Edit” link to change your settings before sending the email.

Sending Confidential emails in Gmail has been made easy and convenient to help keeps all classified information in the organisation or with clients truly classified.

Revoking Recipients Access

After sending a confidential email in Gmail, you can anytime revoke access for reading the email.

Simply go to your “Sent” folder and click on the confidential email you have sent.
It will show you the content expiry date along with a link to “Remove access”.
Click on the link to revoke the access.
You will see a message at the bottom saying, “Action completed”. Now, the “Remove access” link will be changed to “Renew access” with the notification saying, “Content is expired”.
Click on the “Renew access” link to reset the expiration date.

Reading Confidential Email

If you have set no passcode required, the recipient can simply read the email using the mobile app or desktop interface. The message will show a similar content expiry notification with an expiration date.

As mentioned, recipients can’t forward, print, download or copy the email content.

Email Has Expired

There are three possibilities if you can’t see the content of the confidential email:

The sender revoked your access to read the content.
Deleted the sent email before the expiration date.
The set expiration date of the email is already expired.

In all these cases, you will see an “Email has expired” notification in the message. It will have a note saying, “The sender has set a limit on how much time you have to view this email”.

When to Use Confidential Mode and When Not?

Confidential emails in Gmail are a cool option for sending restricted content.

You can use this feature for the following scenarios:

You can send product launch or client project details that is valid only for a few days or weeks. After the set expiration time, you can either renew the date or leave the email content to expire automatically.
Protect the email with a passcode to avoid data leaking or accidental reading of an unrelated person.
You do not want the recipients to forward the email or reproduce it in any form by copying.
Follow organizational requirements to send the email as confidential when using Gmail.

However, it is obvious the recipient can take a screenshot and grab the text from that. You can easily tap and copy the text from screenshot images on smartphones like iPhones. Therefore, do not send secret messages in confidential mode. In addition, there will be no mention of confidentiality classification in the email. Hence, you should not use this feature for Outlook confidential classification replacement in legal projects that needs explicit data classification to be mentioned in the emails.