
Ask HN: New to freelancing how do clients send you passwords? - capalmer1013
As freelancers how do your clients usually send you passwords? My clients have been emailing them to me and it feels weird.
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davismwfl
A lot of times my clients did not have IT staff and were not running any sort
of password managers so it was interesting.

So two things I had them do routinely are below, though some would still just
send me an email with username/password in it (always felt dirty).

Best overall option, have them create a user account for you with a temporary
password on whatever service you need access to. That is safe to send via
email then you immediately change it. Then when you are done with their
project they can just remove you.

If it is for a service that they can't create more user accounts, I would have
them email me the user name, and either tell me the password over a phone call
(choice 1), or text me the password on my cell phone. While still not the most
ideal, it would minimize some of the exposure of just having a
username/password in a single email.

I also advised all clients to change the username and password often and
especially when I was complete with the project. I told them they should do
that in reference to any company or freelancer they use.

All this for the 95% chance that you will still receive passwords like
"password1", or their company name with some date appended etc. Point being
any middle schooler could probably guess the password. I'd usually always send
an email about password security in these cases as a helpful service but also
a little bit of a CYA in case anything ever happened. So I could point to them
that I warned them to change weak passwords.

