Email attachment or link? How to share a confidential PDF safely

Most confidential documents still travel as email attachments. It is convenient, but once you press send you lose control: the file sits in several inboxes, gets forwarded, synced to phones and backed up. If it leaks, you will not know where from.

Four ways to share, from loosest to tightest

• Plain attachment. Fine for anything you would not mind seeing in public. No control after sending.
• Attachment with a visible watermark. Adding "CONFIDENTIAL" or the recipient's name with Watermark PDF discourages casual sharing, but every recipient gets the same mark unless you make a separate file for each.
• Cloud folder link. You can revoke access later, but everyone downloads the same file, so a leaked copy does not tell you who shared it.
• Tracked link. With Tracked Share every recipient gets a personal copy with its own hidden code, you see who received it and how often they downloaded it, and you can revoke a copy or stop sharing at any time.

Settings worth using for sensitive documents

• Expiry: 7 days for time-limited offers, 30 or 90 days for longer reviews. After that the stored file is deleted.
• Downloads per person: one or two downloads is usually enough and stops a link from being reused.
• Forwarding: turn it off for board papers or legal documents, leave it on when you want to see how a document travels.
• Print mark: keep it on when people are likely to print, so paper copies can be traced too.

Prove the document was not changed

For contracts, offers and invoices, the risk is often not leaking but editing: someone changes a number and claims it was yours. Stamping the final PDF with Verify Stamp lets anyone check that the file is exactly what you sent.

No method makes a document impossible to copy. Choose the one that fits the risk, and keep the most sensitive details out of documents that travel widely.