Encrypt email attachments sent from within Quicken

Dan Glynhampton

The latest version of Quicken (at least the windows version, I have no experience of the Mac but assume it is the same) includes the capability to email reports directly from within Quicken. This is potentially a very useful capability to send your information to, for example, the financial professionals who assist you with managing your money.



However, emailing your personal finance information unencrypted over the Internet is not good practice. As currently implemented, the report which is emailed could be read by anyone able to access it.



I’d like to suggest that an option be added to Quicken to encrypt (protected by a password) the PDF and Excel files of reports that can be created and emailed directly from within Quicken. I would envision it working as follows:



• Somewhere in Edit/Preferences an option would be available to Encrypt email attachments


• When emailing a report, if the Preferences option to encrypt is set, the user would be prompted for a password during the email creation process, and the resulting attachment would be protected by that password.


• The password used would obviously have to be pre-agreed with the recipient or sent to them by a separate route to the emailed report.



Sending unencrypted financial information over the Internet is clearly unwise, so I hope this idea will gain support from the user community and be implemented by Quicken.

smayer97

QMac does not have the ability to email anything.

Dan Glynhampton

QMac does not have the ability to email anything.

Thanks for that clarification, I guess this becomes a Windows only request then.

I'm aware that the reports in QMac leave something to be desired compared to QM2007 and Qwin both from the comments in this forum and your curated lists of QMac ideas, but I wasn't aware that the email capability hadn't been added at the same time that it was added to QWin; perhaps that's the basis of a new idea post for QMac?

smayer97

QMac does not have the ability to email anything.

I have no need for built-in e-mail functionality (at least not yet). But if some Mac user feels the need, I guess they will do that  ;-)

Unknown

QMac does not have the ability to email anything.

The email function centers on the Business part of HBR.  So I think that the Mac side needs to walk before they worry about running for this.  :-)

Dan Glynhampton

QMac does not have the ability to email anything.

Yeah, I guess there are a few other things higher up on the Mac developers list than this one :-)  Nevertheless, if the goal is approximate parity with the Windows version it will have to be added at some point.

I don't have HBR, so I wasn't thinking about those features, but rather the email capability that was added to the toolbar of reports in QWin sometime in the last year:



I'd like to be able to use it, but I'm uncomfortable sending un-encrypted attachments.  If I were using HBR, I'd probably feel the same about whatever items it is able to email directly from within Quicken, so I hope this suggestion will be picked up and implemented in the not too distant future.  In the meantime I'll continue saving the reports to disc, adding a password and then emailing.

Dan Glynhampton

Further thought on how this might work which simplifies my suggestion above as it avoids the need for any preference setting.

When sending an email an email preview window opens where the To and From addresses etc. are entered.  Within that window something like this could be added (example taken from 7zip)



If the password fields are left blank then no encryption is added, if a password is entered (in both fields, and they have to match) then the attachment should be encrypted using the provided password.