Online form ethics/security question

[cokecan]

Hi Guys

I work for a research unit that advertises for participants to help with the research. Currently there is a paper-based contact/consent form that's given out so people can fill it in and post it back.

I've been toying with the idea of creating an online version of this form that simply emails the same information thats in the paper based version to us.

The thought crossed my mind about how secure it would be to have this in an online form and automatically emailed? The form contains details such as name, age, address, phone number and email etc.

I imagine that it would need to be encrypted and/or use a secure connection if it was connecting to a database to be stored but in this case it's not, so would any of that be relavent if the form just posted to say the php mail() function?

Has anyone done anything similar or that can shed some light on this?

Thanks in advance

 

[SMB30]

Probably want something like this: http://www.xpertmailer.com/

We used it recently to send secure emails for a project. We used googlemail's secure mail servers with it.