用于订单确认电子邮件的 phpmailer 的安全性

Question

I am wondering it using phpmailer for my confirmation emails is secure.

the order of the pages goes like this:

order_confirmation.php checkout_process.php (not technically seen by the user this is the page order confirmation information is sent to/email is sent out to user and order added to database) checkout_success.php

On the checkout_process page though I am changing the way emails are sent to use phpmailer as we have seen exchange servers/gmail accounts were bouncing our emails back.

the emails are now working but I am wondering if it is secure to have our server info/password on the checkout_process.php page:

   try {
        //Server settings
        $mail->SMTPDebug = false;                      // Enable verbose debug output
        $mail->isSMTP();                                            // Send using SMTP
        $mail->Host       = 'smtp.office365.com';                    // Set the SMTP server to send through
        $mail->SMTPAuth   = true;                                   // Enable SMTP authentication
        $mail->Username   = 'email@ourcompany.com';                     // SMTP username
        $mail->Password   = 'our actual password';                               // SMTP password
        $mail->SMTPSecure = PHPMailer::ENCRYPTION_STARTTLS;         // Enable TLS encryption; `PHPMailer::ENCRYPTION_SMTPS` also accepted
        $mail->Port       = 587;                                    // TCP port to connect to

        //Recipients
        $mail->setFrom('email@ourcompany.com', 'company name');
        $mail->addAddress($order->customer['email_address'], $order->customer['firstname']);     // Add a recipient
        $mail->addReplyTo('email@ourcompany.com', 'company');




        // Content
        $mail->isHTML(true);                                  // Set email format to HTML
        $mail->Subject = EMAIL_TEXT_SUBJECT;
        $mail->Body    = $email_order;
        $mail->AltBody = 'Your order with our company has shipped';

        $mail->send();
        echo 'order confirmation sent to order#:<br/>';
    } catch (Exception $e) {
        echo "Message could not be sent. Mailer Error: {$mail->ErrorInfo}";

Answer 1

In order to use any mail server, you will have to provide secret credentials, like your password. Doing so doesn't by itself make anything insecure. If someone manages to hack into your server, they can see this file and thus the password, but if it's stored somewhere else, they can just follow the same trail that this file will to fetch it. (If it's stored encrypted in a database, for example, this file will still need to get the database credentials and the decryption key from somewhere that the hacker would also have access to.)

That said, if your code here is in some sort of code repository (as it likely is), then that's not a suitable place to include the password. Apart from hacking into your server, someone can now hack into your repository to get the password. To avoid this potential issue, your password should be stored somewhere else, which this file can reference. Common practice these days is to use a .env file for such details, with this file existing only on the server, not in any repository. As a side benefit, it makes it easy to change the credentials (for your dev server, etc.) without touching your code.