Anonymous sending for journalists
PhantomFox runs the anonymous sending system for journalists and researchers. Sender privacy is a product feature here rather than a side effect, so a single message can go out without your personal identity attached to the address it came from.
On this page
Some messages cannot carry a name. A first approach to a source, a question to an organisation that would rather not answer it, a survey that would be biased if the sender were known. This page is about sending exactly one of those and nothing more.
Why is an ordinary mailbox wrong for this?
Because it is built to prove who you are. A normal account carries your name, your organisation and a trail through your provider, and every one of those was designed to be visible.
Journalists work around it with throwaway accounts that are slow to make and obvious to spot. The workaround is worse than the problem.
What does anonymous sending here actually do?
It lets you send from infrastructure that is not yours and does not carry your personal identity. Sender privacy is treated as a feature of the product rather than something you have to engineer around it.
No domain, no records and no technical setup are involved, and the message can be out within five minutes of you deciding to send it. More detail sits on anonymous sending.
What are the limits worth knowing?
We do not send phishing, credential harvesting, malware or anything designed to deceive a recipient into handing something over, and we do not supply lists. Anonymity here is about the sender, not about what the message is allowed to do.
It is also worth understanding what anonymity means technically before relying on it, which is covered in can an anonymous email be traced. Pricing for a single message is on pricing.
| On a message sent this way | What the recipient sees | What they do not |
|---|---|---|
| The sending address | an address on our infrastructure | your personal address |
| The message itself | exactly what you wrote | nothing added |
| Your organisation | nothing, unless you say it | your employer |
| A reply route | one, if you set it up | your usual mailbox |
| Your name | only if you sign it | your identity by default |
Readers sending a report rather than an enquiry want identity free sending for a report, and people sending something light hearted want prank email sending for a joke on a friend. Write the one message and send it.