Are there any potential pitfalls or security concerns when including external HTML files in PHP mailers?

Including external HTML files in PHP mailers can potentially introduce security vulnerabilities, such as allowing malicious code to be executed or exposing sensitive information. To mitigate these risks, it is important to sanitize the content of the external HTML files before including them in the email body. This can be done by using PHP functions like htmlspecialchars() to escape special characters and prevent cross-site scripting attacks.

// Load external HTML file
$html_content = file_get_contents('external_file.html');

// Sanitize the HTML content
$sanitized_content = htmlspecialchars($html_content);

// Include the sanitized content in the email body
$mail->Body = $sanitized_content;