You drag a 3 GB video into WeTransfer, type your client's address, hit send — and then you are told to go and find a six digit code in your inbox. Again. You did this yesterday. You did it on this same laptop, in this same browser.
It is the single most common complaint we hear from freelancers, so it is worth explaining honestly what that code is actually for, and what it is not for.
What the code is really doing
The email code is an ownership check. Anyone can type any "from" address into a web form, so before a transfer goes out with your name on it, the service wants proof that you can read mail at that address. It stops three specific things:
- Spoofing. Someone sending malware "from" your address to your client.
- Anonymous abuse. Throwaway senders using a free tier as a spam relay.
- Quota dodging. One person cycling through invented addresses to reset a free allowance.
Those are legitimate concerns. Every file transfer service has to solve them somehow.
Why it keeps happening to you
The frustrating part is not the check itself — it is that the check does not seem to remember you. That usually comes down to one of these:
- You are sending without an account, so there is no session to remember. Each send is a brand new stranger.
- Your browser is clearing cookies, or you are in private mode, or you are on a work machine with strict privacy settings.
- You switched device, network or browser profile.
- You typed a slightly different sender address than last time.
In other words the code is not punishing you for being new. It is punishing you for being unrecognisable, and a logged-out sender is unrecognisable by design.
The hidden cost of the ritual
For a hobbyist, thirty seconds is nothing. For someone billing by the hour it is a real tax:
- You leave the upload tab to open your mail client.
- Your upload is now in a background tab, where some browsers throttle it.
- The code arrives late, or lands in Promotions, or in a shared inbox you do not control.
- You paste it, and discover the page timed out.
It is also a bad moment to interrupt. You are usually sending files at the end of a job, against a deadline, often on hotel wifi.
How Shako handles the same problem
We took the view that verification should happen once per person, not once per send.
Shako asks you to confirm your email a single time when you create your account. After that, every transfer goes straight out — no code, no inbox detour, no half finished upload sitting in a background tab. If you are signed in, we already know exactly who you are, so re-proving it adds nothing except delay.
For genuinely one-off sends, we still verify anonymous senders, because the spoofing problem is real and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The difference is that regulars are treated as regulars.
The other thing we changed
While we were rethinking the send flow, we rethought the bill too. Most services charge you a flat monthly fee for storage you mostly do not use. Shako charges by how long files are kept — one credit per day of retention — and gives credits back when you clear a transfer early.
So the fast path and the cheap path are the same path: send it, let the client grab it, delete it, get credited. You can see how that compares with the alternatives on our file transfer comparison page, or read the head to head with Shako vs WeTransfer.
Quick answers
Can I stop WeTransfer asking for a code? Largely, yes — sign in with an account rather than sending logged out, and stop clearing cookies for the site. You will still be asked again on new devices.
Is the code the same as two factor authentication? No. It is an address ownership check on the sender field, not a second factor protecting a password.
Is skipping the code less safe? Not if identity is established another way. A signed-in session is stronger evidence than a code pasted into a public form.
If you send files most weeks, the honest fix is to stop sending as an anonymous stranger. Try a transfer on Shako and see how much faster the second one is.