By Mark O’Neill

Despite the proliferation of file storage sites on the internet such as Dropbox, I am still a bit of an old fashioned geek at heart and I always end up emailing big files to people by zipping them first. But old-fashioned as I am, I am also paranoid, so I always encrypt my zips with a password.

Then I email the recipient a riddle to solve, and the answer to the riddle is the password to open the ZIP file. To this day, my mother still hasn’t been able to open the ZIP file containing the Christmas photos from 2006. I think she is going slowly nuts. “JUST TELL ME THE GODDAMN PASSWORD!”. I think my inheritance is at stake.

But even though I have given the zip file a password, I am still convinced that the folder is not as strong as it could be. So when I discovered the FREE SecureZIP, I decided to give it a trial run.   It is supposed to provide zipped folders with much stronger encryption standards and make it much harder for people to break in by brute force.

It supports not only the ZIP format but also RAR, which is quite interesting as I work with RAR files a lot. It also apparently integrates into Microsoft Outlook as well as Comodo secure email certificates. Since I don’t use either, I couldn’t test those, so if anyone out there wants to try that out and report back, that would be super thank you.

SecureZIP also integrates with your computer’s virus scanner so any incoming ZIP files are automatically scanned for potential threats.

Where we’re going, who needs 7-Zip?