What your recipient actually receives
What the delivery email looks like from the other side, what the recipient has to do, and why they should never be surprised by it.
One email
Your recipient receives a single email from My Signal Vault. Your message is the body of it, and files small enough to send are attached to it. There is no account for them to create and no password to set. If they can read an email, they can read what you sent.
The one exception is a file too large to attach. That arrives as a download link in the same email, which opens once they confirm the address the vault was sent to.
They hear nothing beforehand
Nothing is sent to the recipient when you create the vault, arm it, edit it, or miss a reminder. As far as they are concerned, the vault does not exist until the day it delivers. This is deliberate, and it is also why a typo in the address is invisible until it is too late.
Tell them anyway
The single best thing you can do for a vault is to tell the person, once, in advance: "If you ever get an automated email from something called My Signal Vault, it is from me, it is real, please read it." A message arriving out of the blue from an unfamiliar service, on the worst day of someone's life, is very easy to mistake for a scam and delete.
If telling them is not possible, write the first two lines of your message so that they establish who you are and why they are receiving it, before anything else.
Files
Files arrive decrypted, in their original format. Up to about 9MB travels as ordinary email attachments. Anything beyond that is listed in the email with a button that downloads it: one link per recipient, opened by confirming the address the vault was sent to, good for 90 days. Every open and every download is written to your audit log, so you can see what was collected and when.
See it for yourself
You do not have to imagine any of this. Open a vault and press Send a test, and the exact email your recipients would get is sent to your own address, attachments and download link included, with a banner on top saying it is a test. See testing your delivery.
What they cannot do
The recipient has no access to your account, your other vaults, your file list or your history. They receive the contents of one vault at one moment. There is nothing for them to log in to and nothing to revoke afterwards.
Still stuck?
The assistant has read every page in this help centre and answers in seconds. If it cannot help, a person will.