Sanitize Files Before You Email Them
Once an attachment leaves your outbox, you can't unsend it. That's easy to forget in the middle of a busy workday — you drag a file into an email, hit send, and move on. But most everyday files carry more than the content you meant to share. Documents keep author names and edit histories, photos carry GPS coordinates, and pasted text can hide invisible characters. None of it shows up when you glance at the file before attaching it.
For remote teams especially, this adds up fast. A file might pass through several people's laptops, get reused as a template, or land in front of a client — all while quietly carrying whoever last touched it.
What actually rides along in an attachment
- Author and company metadata — the real name tied to your Microsoft or Google account, often baked into a document's properties.
- GPS and device data — if a photo is attached straight from a phone, it can carry the exact location it was taken.
- Invisible characters — zero-width characters and stray whitespace that sneak in from copy-pasting text between tools.
- Content Credentials (C2PA) — provenance metadata some AI and editing tools stamp onto images.
What scrub checks — and what it doesn't yet clean
For images, scrub reads the file locally and shows you exactly what's inside — EXIF, XMP, IPTC, C2PA data, invisible text characters, homoglyphs, and anything appended past the end of the file — then removes it losslessly with one click, no upload involved.
For PDFs and Word/Office files, scrub currently detects hidden content — like leftover tracked changes or embedded text — and tells you plainly what it found. It doesn't clean those file types yet, so if a scan flags something in a PDF or Office document, you'll need to remove it in the source application (Accept All changes, inspect document properties, re-export) before sending. See our guide on tracked changes in Word docs for the specifics.
A pre-send checklist
- Run images through scrubScreenshots, photos, exported graphics — check and clean before attaching.
- Scan PDFs and Office docsLet scrub tell you what's hidden inside, then clean it in the source app.
- Check pasted textText copied from a chat app or AI tool can carry invisible characters — scrub finds them.
- Double-check the recipient listNot a scrub feature, but the single most common leak — worth a second look every time.
The short version
Attachments carry more than what's on the screen. Run images through scrub to check and clean them locally, and scan PDFs and Office files for hidden content before you send. Get scrub free and make it part of your pre-send routine.