Email has made it so much easier to communicate with clients and employees, but with the increase in the use of e-mail comes the concern of sending sensitive documents.

Whether you are a CPA sending tax information back and forth to your clients, or a company trying to pass invoices to your customers, secure, private delivery of these documents is paramount to your relationship.

A new service called Vault Inbox was introduced this week as one possible commercial solution to the problem faced by e-mail users in business.

Vault Inbox customers provide their unique vault e-mail addresses (e.g. myname@vaultinbox.com), enabling third parties to send e-documents directly to the vault's secure online storage environment, thus bypassing the privacy issues related to web- or work-based e-mails. E-documents that could be sent to a vault include e-statements from banks or credit card providers, contracts from lawyers, tax returns from CPAs, airline frequent flyer statements and other types of e-documents from financial advisors, healthcare providers, or business associates.

Retail list price for an individual, 100MB vault with password protection is $60 per year.

Practice Idea

If the Vault Inbox (or any similar commercial solution) is viable for your business, why not offer all of your top tier clients their own personal vault that your firm can pick up the tab for? At $60 a year it may be a great investment and shows that your firm is thinking about technology and how to bring it to your client base.

See the Vault Inbox Web site for more information.

A quick search on the Internet shows these other document delivery systems that may also be a solution for your firm:

• Airborne Express' eCourier System
• RemoteDocs (used in the Lending Industry)
• SwiftSend

A more thorough article outlining the state of the art in online document delivery can be found on InfoWorld Secure Online Delivery Sprouts Wings from December 2001.