I have a client who has a crimestoppers' website. They want to provide visitors a means to submit anonymous crime tips, which would then be forwarded to a pre-established email address at the local police department.
What is the best / easiest way to accomplish this? The sender's IP address needs to be hidden. My client also needs to be able to pull reports showing how many tips were submitted and forwarded.
Many thanks!
A simple contact form can be used. It's up to the developer's trust to hide the IP. The submitter won't see anything what is being done using PHP.
You can then update a database with the tips being posted before sending the mails.
In terms of development, you can use a plugin such as Contact Form 7 and then use its hooks to save the tips submitted before sending the mails.
While it is rather simple to set up a contact form that submits to an email address (just use the excellent ContactForm7, as rrikesh's answer suggests). However, getting anonymity right (especially against a party that has as much power and resources) is tricky. You need to be clear about the level of anonymity that you can provide. Log files, document metadata or your ISP can easily give a lot of information away.
Here are two project that have different approaches. They're both not ready-made solutions to your question, but still relevant:
This is a web service run by the German Privacy Foundation. It's basically a message relay like the one you want, except that the user has to trust the Foundation, not you. This model highly depends on the institution providing this service. I'm sure there are other, US-based services like this.
An open source software tool used by the German newspaper Die ZEIT.
a reasonably secure web application for submitting content anonymously. It allows to upload attachments which are then sanitized of a number of meta-data which could compromise the submitters identity. Next, the sanitized files are encrypted via GPG and sent via email to a pre-configured list of recipients. The original (potentially 'dirty') files are then deleted from the file system of the server. Thus, neither should admins with access to the server be able to access any submissions, nor should any of the recipients have access to the unsanitized raw material.
This is an attempt to automate the crucial steps to strip any identifying data from the submission and encrypt it, so only the intended recipients can access it.
You would have to host this yourself, though. And it's a Python app.
