CloudFiles offers a few important features related to email collection and authentication from your file viewers. You can use these features on any type of CloudFiles links to make your documents more secure and insightful. Once enabled, the document link access is preceded with an email wall that makes sure your link settings are respected.

In this article, we first talk about the CloudFiles email wall that enables this on the link viewer side. We then talk individually about how email collection and authentication works with the email wall and how the end user experience looks like. Additionally we also cover certain admin settings that can be applied on top of this feature.

If you use CloudFiles gating features, whenever you access the link, an email wall will pop-up before access to file is provided. This email wall ensures that the various email related settings you have applied on your link are respected by the viewer. This wall can help viewers enter their email, login through google or outlook, verify emails and even restrict wrong email.

We show the email wall below. The image has been labelled to provide more info around the type of login options available, prompts that can come up and other features and functionality.

Content gating is one of the many features marketers use to get email addresses of their prospects. With CloudFiles, you can see which users are interested in your documents. CloudFiles collects the email through the email wall in section above. Since this is soft gating, the email may not be always verified and correct.

Soft Gating feature is usually recommended when you are distributing the file in a way that you don't know who's gonna access it. E.g. when hosting documents on website, or sending posts on social media etc...

To set a Soft Gating on your links follow the following steps:

These steps are shown in the GIF below.

CloudFiles will give you details of every email id that has been used to open your link and the time they have spent on your document. This is an invaluable addition to your inbound marketing tactics. 

The Hard ID feature in CloudFiles, ensures that only users that have been authenticated emails can view your documents. Once enabled, the user is shown the email wall when they access the document link. They must either login through google or outlook or verify their email using a one time password in their inbox. Only when the email has been verified, can the user view the document.

Hard ID authentication is recommended for sharing highly sensitive documents such as contracts, PII etc...

To set Hard ID on your links follow the following steps:

When your client accesses the file, they will see a prompt for email authentication through a number of options as shown below. In case they do not own any of these accounts, they can even perform a manual, one-time email verification to access the file. If the verification is successful, the file is shown to the client.

There are certain things associated to email collection and authentication features that admins can control. Here we talk about such features.

CloudFiles admins can choose which email options to show on the email wall. E.g. you can choose to show only google login or only inbox based verification, by selecting appropriate settings in your Admin panel. The settings related to this are located in Settings > Account > Viewer Customizations > Login options.

In compliance with international laws such as GDPR, CloudFiles can provide an additional privacy consent wall to collect user's consent before storing their personal information. The legal message on this consent dialog can be customized using the Settings > Account > Compliances screen as shown below.