About pqnote

pqnote is a tool for sending a password or another secret as a note that is designed to be encrypted in your browser and deleted after it is read once.

Who it’s for

Anyone who needs to hand one person a password, a recovery code, an API key or a set of bank details, and would rather not leave a readable copy in an email or a chat history. The note tool is opening soon. Until it does, this site’s guide compares other ways to send a password, with what each one leaves behind.

Who makes it

pqnote is made by Secria, which makes Secria Mail and Secria VPN. Because Secria sells email, we have a stake in how people send sensitive things, and we say so here. pqnote runs on its own domain, apart from Secria’s products. This site has no ads and no accounts. pqnote isn’t affiliated with Privnote, Onetime Secret, Bitwarden, 1Password, WhatsApp, Slack or any other service named here, and their names belong to their owners.

How the tool is designed

The note is encrypted in your browser before it is sent. The key goes into the link after the #, which browsers don’t send to the server. The server keeps only the encrypted copy, and deletes it after the first read or when it expires. A passphrase is optional. Before the tool opens, each of these points is checked against the tool’s code, and this page will say exactly what was checked and when.

How we check

What this site says about how other services work comes from that service’s own help pages, documentation or policies, not reviews of them. Anything about cryptography comes from NIST, and anything about how browsers handle links comes from MDN Web Docs. Where we cite a news report, we name the outlet and the date. A second pass re-opens every source from scratch and compares each sentence with it. Each page shows the date it was checked, and we re-check vendor features on each major release.

Report a note

A note can hold any text, including a link to a fake sign-in page. If a pqnote link reached you as part of a scam, or a note asks you to sign in somewhere you didn’t expect, don’t enter anything. Tell us with the link and how it reached you, using the contact page below.

Corrections

Spotted something wrong or out of date? Tell us with a link to the source at secria.me/contact. Abuse reports go to the same place for now.